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A Critical Assessment of Van Tils

Christian Theory of Knowledge

Matt Marino
History of Christianity 2
Dr. Ryan Reeves
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This essay will deal in two areas of the thought of Cornelius Van Til. Of the first area there
will be mostly admiration, and of the second there will be a thorough criticism. It will be
important to note that these two arenas of theological reflection are inseparable. All the
more so was this the case for Van Til. For lack of better terminology, we will use the word
heresiology1 for the first idea and the more familiar word epistemology for the second.
Unfortunately much more space must be devoted to the arena of criticisma critique of
Van Tils epistemologyacknowledging that admirable side only as the backdrop. That is
unavoidable with the limits of space.

Thesis statement. Van Tils epistemology was entirely a function of his heresiology, the
consequence of which has been a departure from the classical Christian understanding of
objective knowledge.

One simple way to summarize my thesis is by means of analogy: Van Til was like the quality
control inspector, not the guy out in the field. And we need people to wear that hat. But in
the course of the Van Tillian system being worked out, quality control (heresiology) became
confused with the field activity (apologetics), and in turn, the response of those in the field
(Reformed apologists) became confused with the product itself (epistemology). I am aware
of the way that this analogy is oversimplified. However I trust that in the course of my
paper it will be essentially justified.

Though I will be borrowing from other works of Van Til that I happen to have read in the
past, such as Christian Apologetics and the Introduction to Systematic Theology, my main text will
be A Christian Theory of Knowledge. I will also make important references to John Muethers
biography of Van Til and other works: some distilling Van Til, such as two books by John
Frame, and the infamous critique by Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley, Classical Apologetics.

There is one last point of introduction that should not be avoided. I am biased. When I
became a Christian, I was already head deep in a few years of doing little else but reading
the great philosophers of the Western worldnot the second rate cliff notes of all the
contemporary commentators who have often misread those philosophers, but the primary
sources themselves. Upon entering the Evangelical community in 1999, let me just say that I
did not find the standard reading of the history of Western philosophy very accurate. It
seemed as motivated by anti-intellectualism as the church traditions that do not engage in
scholarship at all. Granted that my early exposure to presuppositionalism was a caricature
through the lectures and books of John Warwick Montgomery. Then in 2001, I read Classical
Apologetics. My mind was made up, so that even reading Van Tils Christian Apologetics and

1 No novelty attempted. Alister McGrath uses the term in his book on Heresy. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
 !3

Frames Apologetics to the Glory of God a few years later did not change my basic thoughts
about presuppositionalism (though I found Frames book to be much more consistent with a
serious engagement with unbelieving systems of thought).

After the news of being accepted to RTS, I had a few more months at my church of
teaching classes and decided to do a course with our college students on Frames Doctrine of
the Knowledge of God, during which time I would also read Van Tils Introduction to Systematic
Theology. My mind began to change a little. I had come to the place where there was now
more appreciation for what Van Til and (by extension) Frame were up to. They have some
very valuable theological pieces to protect and situate in their proper place. I could also see
that there was even a point at which the authors of Classical Apologetics may have
overreached in their critique. I refer to the notion that Van Til rejected any common ground
with the unbeliever.2

On the other hand, my original discomfort persists at a pattern of emphasis that eschews
and deconstructs any talk of natural theology and even objective truthat least as that
latter term was traditionally used. The purpose of this brief sketch of my own journey is to
make as plain as I can that the issues I have with Van Til are less about apologetic method
and almost entirely about epistemological foundations for the entire Christian worldview. It
is also my natural inclination to show how Van Til must be understood by providing context
from his historical predecessorsmost immediately in the form of Kuyper, Bavinck, Vos,
Warfield, and Machenhowever, because of the nature of this essay, I will include that
material in an appendix at the end. First we must dive into Van Tils Christian Theory of
Knowledge. This book was chosen, quite frankly, in order to give its author one more chance
to explain himself.

Heresiology and Epistemology: A Confusion of Fields

My opening analogy of the quality control supervisor (heresiologist) is useful first in looking
at the structure of the book. A book entitled A Christian Theory of Knowledge instantly
strikes one as a synonym for A Christian Epistemology. Yet this is precisely not what we get
from its author; at least not in a systematic form. There is no unpacking of the mechanisms
of knowing, nor of the nature of the objects of knowledge. No doubt the work is occupied
with epistemology in surveying the field of all of the wrong theories of knowledge out there.
And Van Til pits scriptural authority against autonomous reason exactly where one would

2 cf. As I have been open to exploring what Van Til (and Frame by some extension) have been getting at, it is only
fair that re-read the last section of Classical Apologetics to see if the authors really did fail to appreciate the
complexities. So I am content to say that they may have overreached.
 !4

expect. There is his epistemology at the outset. What could be clearer and more pious? Let
me answer by doing what one should always do at the beginning of any disagreement. We
should first define our terms.

What is epistemology? Very often it will be defined as either our theory of knowledge or
else the answer to the question How do you know? But this is problematic. Even if we
accept these two angles into our definition, it may escape our notice how the two are set o
on contradictory aims. A theory of knowledge, if successful, will presumably be about real
knowledge. If true knowledge, then it must be a knowledge of something real above and
beyond our own finite capacities of reason. In short, this knowledge is objective. It is of a
real truth that must be true independent of my mind or yours. And we will remember that
the second angle on defining epistemology was as an answer to the question How do you
know? Now this may be entirely subjective. It may refer to the natural history of ones own
knowledgei. e. Where did you learn that? or How did you arrive at that conclusion? It
may be cognitive science. It may be dismissive Marxist deconstruction. It may be any
number of probes into how a particular finite mind, or group of finite minds, happen to
perform in their acts of reasoning. There is nothing wrong with those questions. But if that
was all we mean by epistemology then the subtitles on the packagetruth criteria or
standards for truthmay understandably leave us with buyers remorse. No doubt How
we know is a legitimate portion of epistemology, but How do we know that we know is
what I like to call first order epistemology. The subjective question about ones own
knowledge, or any finite perspective, while not unimportant, I prefer to call second order
epistemology.

How this second-order subjective definition came to be the central focus of epistemology is
owing to the triumph of Kant. Following the Enlightenment, epistemology moved
indoors, and any talk of the objective essence of things was restricted to the realm of pure
reason which Kant taught us all to leave behind. The knowledge studied by epistemology
was now only allowed to be that knowledge as it appears to the finite perspective.
Classicalism rejects this wholesale. Modern or, perhaps it could be said, Postmodern
perspectivalism follows from the Kantian rejection of the noumenal. Van Til and his
tradition think they are rejecting Kants Critique. I do not think this is so. In speaking of
Van Tils system, Frame very helpfully refers to a domain of epistemology in a more objective
way: namely, the metaphysics of knowledge.3 That is certainly a good start. But I think we
need to follow through, even if it means discovering that Van Til was simply wrong about
these things: even if it means finding out that Van Til and his tradition has been operating
on assumptions that were Kants conclusions.

3 Frame, CVT,
 !5

Strangely enough I think the best way to show how Van Til commits the error that he does
is by setting it against the backdrop of something I think he should be admired for.
Unsurprisingly Van Til is held at a distance for his heresiology, namely, in his great sin of
finding a heretic under every non-Van-Tillian-phrase. Perhaps he was harsher and more
exacting at times. So the admirable quality that I am referring to is his understanding of
Reformed orthodoxy and the task of the theologian in its maintenance. The first thing we
need to understand about Van Tils defensive stance is how he understood the nature of the
thing he was defending. The Christian faith is a system of truth. It is integrated. It is a
perfect unity in Gods mind. It ought to be so in our minds, at least in a way proper to our
creaturely knowledge. The fact that we do not know as God knows does not alter the reality
that the integrative and disintegrative nature of systematic truth will still operate in our
finite, sinful minds. Pull a stitch out and the fabric begins to unwind. For example,
compromise on our doctrine of God or of man, and what follows (logically and
psychologically) is a dierent doctrine of the God-man. One error begets another, and the
aberration in ones doctrinal trajectory becomes exponential. Van Til understood this, just as
Machen did. On the other hand, we do not see the system as a whole. It is not for us a
purely deductive system, but rather we continue to come to the Scriptures to submit to its
truth.

John Frame believes that the greatest contribution of Van Til is his distinctly theological
reconciliation of unity and diversity.4 For example, Van Til is both pro-system and anti-
system. He is pro-system in that no supposedly central truth ought to be inflated so as to
undermine the other truths. So Van Til would always say not in spite of, but because of.
Frame infers from this that each doctrine must provide a perspective on all of the others.
But Van Til is also anti-system in his denial that the Christian system is a purely
deductive enterprise, where each doctrine, taken by itself, logically implies all of the others.
It is the pro-system side of Van Til that motivated his unique work in apologetic method.
It doesnt take an expert to see what drove his every point. Something was in danger of
being compromised by allowing our conversations with unbelievers concede to their
definitions of this or that fact. This secular definition would then bleed back into our
theological system at the foundations.

Even Frames complimentary analysis of no central truth in Van Til must be balanced. It is
not enough to see that each doctrine is perfectly connected with each other doctrine, for
not all doctrines are metaphysically equal. Van Til was truly Reformed in his insistence that
the doctrine of God functioned as a center of gravity. Specifically our doctrine of God must

4 cf. VTtT, 7
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hold that he is the Absolute Person. This means that the First Cause must be infinite, self-
sucient, Trinity.5 So to change metaphors from the stitch and the fabric to something with
more substance: Pluck the sun from the center of the solar system and we lose the whole
center of gravity. All is immediately lost. Compromise the doctrine of God. What follows?
The doctrines of how God saves and what he saves us unto cannot help but be radically altered
as a consequence. Van Tils Reformed heresiology cannot be dismissed as a knee-jerk
fundamentalism that sees a slippery slope at every turn. It was a sophisticated analysis of the
nature of the singular universe of doctrine. Because God is self-contained, so the Word of
God is self-contained. And because the Word of God is self-contained, in that Word, God is
self-identified and plays the role of the Ultimate Interpreter of all facts. Van Til would say
that God is the ultimate reference point of predication, whereas in every other system, man
is the ultimate reference point of predication. There can be no disagreement with Van Til
here among the Reformed.

This notion of a perfectly coherent system was both Van Tils great strength and, I believe, a
blind spot in the tradition which followed him. He himself rightly saw that Every fact in
the universe is what it is just because of the place that it has in this system.6 However a
stifling reductionism ensues when every particular criterion cited to judge a truth claim is
made immediately to answer to the whole or else be dismissed as autonomous or a brute
fact or a truth free of interpretation. Take C. S. Lewis famed Moral Lawgiver argument.
What does he begin with but a common sense of right and wrong? Ah, but the unbeliever
has a dierent definition of right and wrong! This is the standard operation. Because no fact
can stand on its own (i. e. a brute fact), no common field of analogy is permitted just
insofar as it lacks a fully Christian interpretation. But how full of an interpretation must we
require? The instinct to see an Arminian or Romanist under every extra-biblical term has
made it dicult for the presuppositional method to shine precisely as an apologetic (which
I believe it can), and has instead barred access for the Reformed mind toward the resources
of general revelation or the wisdom in other traditions.

The authors of Classical Apologetics peg this Van Tillian impulse as a denial that one can know
a particular truth without knowing the universality of truth: the relationship of that truth to
all others. That really would lead to agnosticism. If we read Van Til thoroughly we see a bit
more sophistication, namely, that the particular facts are true because their relation to the
system of truth set forth in Scripture7 not that Scripture has to explicitly make a

5Van Tils reflections on the Trinity are interesting, but even summarizing them would exceed the limits of this
paper cf. Frame, CVT,
6 CVT, 35
7 CTK, 37
 !7

pronouncement on each and every particular. In other words, the extra-biblical particular
truth must be coherent with biblical truth universal.

Epistemology and heresiology are related if all truth is really a function of systematic
theology. Van Til was not wrong in this unity. However, within that system, epistemology
cannot be entirely a function of heresiology as if our theory of knowledge could be entirely
negative. That would make epistemology the theory of what we cannot (or, to state it
ethically, what we should not attempt to) know. Epistemology is about what we do in fact know
and what constitutes standards for knowing it, and the proper ordering of those standards.
This is mostly positive work. If we are always defining our terms down to what this or that
aberrant view means by the term, then we are not doing philosophy anymore so much as we
are spreading paranoia.

Apostasy as an Intellectual Phenomena.

Van Til understood that doctrine not only does divide, but that it ought to divide. In order to
appreciate this we must notice that not all divisions are equal. Someone who thinks on the
level of Van Til thinks of doctrinal divisions primarily as epistemic aairs. Systematic
theologians do not tend to think of doctrinal divisions primarily as the parting of ways
between brothers or church traditions. The latter is a consequence of the former, and the
systematic theologian is not unaware of that, but he is not particularly giddy about that
happening. What happens when the quality control guy is not also aware of the
sensitivities of those not called to his work? When the cultural context we live in is
increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-polemical, the theologians quality control speech
more easily gets misquoted, misconstrued, and otherwise hijacked by winsome wolves
whose task is to neutralize any talk of doctrinal precision, any suggestion that this or that
idea could go in a bad direction.

One wonders whether or not Van Til had the chance to assess Schaeers stair case model
for the movement of ideas through cultures, or through singular minds. Although the elder
statesman was critical of Schaeers overall apologetic method, it seems as if this model at
least will be useful to describe what thinkers like Van Til, or Machen before him, see, that
many other very fine Christian academics do not. I am referring to the ability to chart the
trajectory of doctrinal disintegration in a given system of thought.

The central test case in Van Tils career was his changing interaction with G. C. Berkhouwer.
He initially praised Berkhouwer for his critique of Barth, and then expressed
disappointment when the continental theologian had changed his tune in the 1950s; as
 !8

Muether summarizes, Van Til described Berkhouwer as seeking incoherently to combine

Barth and Bavinck, and Barth is gaining on Bavinck.8 What did that statement mean but
that there is a tendency, a building critical mass, in ones doctrinal development? On this
journey old commitments are weighed in the balance and found wanting.

When many conservatives had bought into the notion that Neo-Orthodoxy made the
modernist-fundamentalist controversy irrelevant, Van Til saw through it to what was
essentially the same between Barth and Kant. This is somewhat ironic given those criticisms
of Van Til linking his thought to Kantian and / or Neo-Orthodox thinking. Nevertheless he
was at least correct in that both Kant and Barth were attempting to make faith protected
from the claims of reason.

Van Til turned his guns from the Neo-Orthodox to the Neo-Evangelical, seeing that the
latter had been infiltrated by the former, beginning as they did in Arminianism and doctrinal
indierentism. For this he was attacked on all sides. But Van Til was essentially right, even if
he made his case by blaming some of the wrong things and with all the charm of an
inquisitor. One can no longer compare the Protestant and Catholic starting points, he
argued, because the Lutheran and Arminian traditions have coalesced into the new
Evangelicalim.9 So we may say then that the Romanist system can be called Christian, but
with a large admixture of naturalism. Evangelicalism is Protestant but with some, though a
much smaller, admixture of naturalism.10

Reformed Particularismthe Preservative.

The term particularism in theology is simply the opposite of universalism. What sense is
there in using it except to make that contrast? I think Van Til would answer by saying that
false doctrines (like universalism) are not static specimens in the petri dish of historical
theology. They move. They mutate. There is not only a doctrine of universalism but also a
universalizing tendency in ones doctrine. It is that natural downward impulse of the lowest
common denominator, a push toward a metaphysical democracy of all things, a leveling of
hierarchy among truths. The logical end of this process in religion is Harnacks universal
fatherhood of God and universal brotherhood of man. So Reformed particularism isnt so

8 Muether, 145
9 cf. CTK, 194ff
10 CTK, 196
 !9

much a doctrine as it is a doctrinal preservative: a check and reversal of this downward

spiral toward the meaninglessness of theological distinctions.

The beginning of his Christian Theory of Knowledge is instructive for grasping how what I am
calling heresiology could ever be a good thing. In fact it is precisely this attention to
getting things so specifically right that is meant to steward the faith of the whole Christian
community though the broadly Evangelical may never appreciate it in this lifetime,
though many seeking a more winsome Reformed theology may only ever see it as morbid
and divisive and self-congratulatory. At any rate, Van Til wrote this in the introduction to
that work:

it is the writers conviction that the cause of evangelical, that is, non-Reformed
Protestantism, is bound to profit from a defense of the Reformed Faith, for a defense
of the Reformed Faith is not primarily a defense of the five points of Calvinism. A
defense of the Reformed Faith is a Reformed method of the defense of Christianity
and this should be to the profit even of Roman Catholic Christianity.11

What Van Til calls here a defense of the Reformed Faith is exactly what he was attempting
to do: to defend Reformed Particularism. This is a good thing to do. But Van Til confused
this with defending Christianity in total. He confused heresiology with apologetics. Most
people later blamed his heresiology for him having a critical spirit. This is extremely short
sighted in my judgment. It would be better to blame his actual confusion in matters of
philosophy. The principle of total integration that is so valuable to Van Tils heresiology is
what makes his apologetic method what it is.

Now what about the second part of that boomerang eect? I said that Van Tils quality
control (heresiology) got confused with the field work (apologetics), but we will recall that I
also said that this, in turn, led to a confusion of the field work (apologetics) with the product
itself (epistemology). We can see this in the nebulous way that the phrase starting point is
used in related debates. How we know what we know as a starting point can mean dierent
things, depending on what one is doing. Let me use a simple piece of imagery. Where does
one start on a house? My answer is that it all depends whether we are talking about the
builders who are contracted or the guests that I have invited over for the holiday. One starts
with the foundation and the other starts with the front door. It is exactly the same when it
comes to the dierence between practical apologetics and the place of epistemology in
system building. The eect of a few generations of presuppositionalist literature has been to
blur this distinction.

11 CTK, 5
 !10

It is true that our defense of the faith and our method of reason are mutually
interdependent. They can certainly come to determine each other. Here is how Van Til
would put it. The Arminian and the Romanist will defend the faith dierently than the
Reformed because they will reason by a dierent principle. That is to say that Arminian and
Catholic apologetics will allow axioms of reason (rationalism) and sense data / experimental
results (empiricism) to function as starting points or as ultimate criteria in this or that
conversation with the unbelieving world. So the secular canons of reason determine the
defense. We always play by their rules. Likewise the rot spreads in reverse: the Arminian and
the Romanist infers his system of doctrine from the moving target of foundations that the
present culture finds intellectually satisfying. One clear example is how the apologist and
systematic theologian alike deal with the problem of evil. Once we have solved the problem
of evil, for example, by the free will defense, we have now made room for free will to
precede saving grace. Van Tils own answer to the problem of evil was to posit God as his
own theodicy, echoing Augustine, Calvin, etc.12 But the usual concession made to free will
boomerangs back from the apologist into our understanding of salvation. Consequently the
problem of evil is an arena that seems to wonderfully make Van Tils point.

On the other hand, what about the self-attestation of Scripture? Both classicalists and
presuppositionalists can agree that the Word of God authenticates itself. The question is
not whether the internal testimony of the Spirit is subjectively ultimate to validate the truth
of God. The question is whether or not things objectively external to the scriptural
propositions can function as epistemological preconditions in any sense. The
presuppositionalist will not deny that this is psychologically the case. We learn the ABCs
before we derive genuine belief from scriptural propositions. At what point to larger
chunks of general revelation become translated, in the Van Tillian mindset, into
autonomous reasoning? Van Til is surely correct in insisting that we must not commend
Scripture to be read as merely a historically reliable document. It must be read as Gods own
word.13 But as Lewis once pointed out, the word merely is a tricky thing. Do our children
read the Bible as Gods own word? What all does that require? A new heart to be sure. And
yet there we are as parents, reading it to themmerely on the grounds that we are their
parents and they enjoy hearing stories from us. Why is this not as inherently suspect as the
invitation for the skeptic to consider the archeological evidence for the dating of prophetic
books or the corroberation of certain first century writers like Tacitus or Josephus? There is

12 cf. Muether on Van Tils paper at Princeton entitled Evil and Theodicy, 52-54
13 CTK, 227
 !11

an answer: the child has a heart to believe and the skeptic does not. Even granting this, such
things should be weighed on a case by case basis.

Van Tils Narrative of the History of Western Thought

A Christian Theory of Knowledge begins by defining the basic terms of the Christian position
and the non-Christian, taking their interpretive cues from either Scripture or autonomous
reason. At this point Van Til begins a survey of how Christians throughout church history
have bridged the gap between Gods word and the unbelieving world. The first few centuries
were a continuous exercise in making the gospel embedded in what the Greek already knew.
So there is more amalgamation than there is analogy. Justin Martyr was held out as the
prototype in this compromise.14 More interesting is how Van Til saw the Logos Christology
as an attempt to relate the eternal Christ to all of the aspects of creation that make for good
apologetics. Thus it leads immediately to subordinationism. This is interesting because of
Frames comment that Van Til saw all deviations as a form of subordinationism.15 From
Tertullian he takes the commitment to preserve the rule of faith, which he treated as a
synonym for the teaching of Scripture.

Van Til saw in Augustine a thinker that the church could get behindbut only the later
Augustine, and even then only as a rough first sketch. Not only did the bishop of Hippo give
us a precursor to the Reformed doctrines of grace, but also a new philosophy of history in
which a self-attested Christ stands opposed, point for point, against the philosophy of the
earthly city. This is the Kuyperian antithesis read back into Augustine, not in a totally forced
way, but certainly so as to distance the two-city narrative from the early writings that were
dependent upon Platonic categories as well as from the Aristotelian ones to come among
the Scholastics.

The most infamous misreading of historical philosophy, I contend, that Van Til had done is
his hatcheting to Thomas Aquinas. It was filtered down to the popular level through Francis
Schaeer and others. And though I received much from Schaeers treatment of the flow of
Western thought, his nature eats up grace formula for Aquinas always seemed a bit forced.
The first thing to note, Van Til began, about the approach of Thomas is that he begins his
identification of God by means of the natural reason.16 This may seem reasonable enough
at first glance. In all of Thomas five ways to show the existence of God he begins with

14 cf. CTK, 77-79

15 cf. CVT,
16 CTK, 169
 !12

something in this world.17 Whether it was from motion, cause, possibility and necessity, the
gradation of things in their imperfection, and things being driven toward an end, in all of
these cases it seems that Aquinas is moving from material particulars to universals.

It is the upshot that most concerns Van Til, and yet his claim about it is remarkable: It is in
this way that Thomas combines one principle which, if carried through, would lead to the
idea that man can know nothing of God and another principle which, if carried through,
would lead to the idea that man can know everything of God. Further he says that this is
correlative to the rationalism involved in the idea that man can directly participate in a
process of definition by which all reality can be exhaustively known.18 This assessment is
bound to leave a sour taste with the reader. Is this anything more than rhetoric? He certainly
means it to be. It rests on the notion that Thomas doctrine of analogy is really more of a
balancing act between univocal and equivocal knowledge.19 It is not genuine analogy between
Creator and creation, between Gods knowledge and ours. So then Thomas thinks he has
the right to argue from eect to cause without first inquiring into the dierences in meaning
between the idea of cause when used by Christians and the idea of cause when used by those
who do not take the Christian position.20 Here is a crystal clear example of my thesis. Van
Til makes cause per se equivalent to all of the relations of cause to all other relevant
things. In other words, the unbeliever is wrong about the nature of causality to such an
extent that the point of contact between the believer and unbeliever in their use of the term
is severed, unintelligible, and thus fruitless.

So here Van Til confuses one set of starting points with another. That is, he confuses where
one starts (as a system-builder / objective epistemology) with where one starts (in an
apologetic encounter with someone who needs the apologist to take that one more
definitional step back). Now Van Til would have a point against Aquinas when it comes to
someone who really does have a radically dierent definition of cause. But the extent to
which unbelief goes in distorting the concept of causality varies from one unbeliever to
another (as well as believers, I might add).

As a further consequence it is said that God is no longer the Absolute-Person of Scripture

but is reduced to a mere it, the conclusion to an Aristotelian syllogism, the sort of

17 Incidentally, Gordon Clark classified Aquinas as an empiricist for this reason cf. Christian Philosophy, 51
18 CTK, 170
19 cf. CTK, 173
20 CTK, 173
 !13

Supreme Being that the natural man may easily reconcile to himself.21 This criticism is
certainly not unique to Van Til; and yet a simple perusal of a lineup of those who usually do
make this criticism would place presuppositionalists in unwelcome company with fideists
and fundamentalists. This is not guilt by association. There is a common thread at least at
this point, where there is a reluctance to handle general revelation. Natural theology is
consigned to being a synthesis of Aristotle plus Christ.22

Within Lutheranism, Melanchthon at first and Francke later would arm divine sovereignty
in a first step and then water in down in a second. Van Til remarks that In both cases it was
really a development rather than a reversal. And it could not be a development if there were
not already some germ of the second position found in the first position.23 This is a brief
sampling of how Van Til understands the interconnectedness of doctrine: how one error is
connected to others, how one error is other errors in the making. And on that score, Van Til
is in line with the historical viewpoint.

In What Ways Does Van Til Depart From Classical Christian Epistemology?

First let us examine his understanding of paradox. Because all of our knowledge is analogical,
for this very reason it must also be paradoxical. What did Van Til mean by this? Let us take
for example that God is one and that three are God. Does the Bible not teach both?
Strangely the solution of Van Til is not to resort to the classical distinction between the
ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity, for that distinction is yet a third thing beyond
Scripture and thus stands as a brute fact outside of what God has revealed. In fact how
Van Til handled the doctrine of the Trinity is a microcosm for how he handled the
aforementioned paradox between unity (pro-system) and diversity (anti-system). The
resolution is his view of analogy. But this analogy: is it a brute fact? Is it data from beyond
divine revelation? He derives it, unlike St. Thomas24, he believes, from the biblical doctrine
of the image of God, and the Creator-creature distinction implied therein. Gods knowledge
is archetypal. Mans knowledge is ectypal. Gods knowledge is intuitive. Mans knowledge is
discursive.

21 cf. CTK, 174-175

22 CTK, 175
23 CTK, 206
24Though it exceeds the scope of this paper, the notion that the classical analogy of being compromises the Creator-
creation distinction also needs to be challenged more comprehensively than was done earlier. Van Til said of the
Aristotelian notion that All individual beings are beings to the extent that they participate in this one ultimate
being (CTK, 160). All such thinking is criticized as implying pantheism, or of subjecting God to categories in
which he is just another member of the same class as created things.
 !14

More than that, analogical reasoning is not simply dependent on God. It must be self-
consciously dependent on God. There is either analogical reasoning in this sense, or else
autonomous reasoning. There is no middle ground. Autonomy in thinking is the attempt
to interpret facts other than as reinterpretations of Gods interpretation. A charge of the
double theory of truth has been made against Van Til along these lines. That is to say that
a thing can be true in the realm of reason, yet false in the realm of religion. Van Til and
his followers would adamantly deny this.

However the Van Tillians reconcile this, it must be admitted that many statements are
found in Van Tils writings that give the impression of surrender to the rational criteria of
the world. In other words, that the rational is the autonomous. As to biblical criticism he
asks whether the Christian should be an obscurantist and hold to the doctrine of authority
of the Scripture though he knows it can empirically be shown to be contrary to the facts of
Scripture themselves?25 Such statements are doubly unhelpful because they seem to
conflate empirical testing with logical contradiction, and they also seem to concede that
there are indeed contradictions in the Scripture. If all Van Til wanted to do is to have us all
confess that we have not reconciled everything and that our commitment to Scripture
should not wait for such reconciliation if that is all he means to say, there are certainly
less confusing ways to say it. He further said that the idea of truth as found in Scripture does not,
as noted, mean a logically penetrable system.26

Why use such terminology? Logic does not penetrate for new data to begin with. It
measures the coherence of that which is already given. It has nothing to tell us about the top
floor of the Deuteronomy 29:29 line between the secret things and the things revealed. Why
not say it like that? As it stood Van Tils words give the impression that logic is equivalent to
mans probing act of reasoning. Incidentally we see the same tendency in Westminsters Vern
Poythress today, whose text on Logic speaks of a dichotomy between (1) a Christian logic
and (2) a universally right logic.27 The consequence of such emphases, I am arguing, is to
commend an antipathy to further study the nature of things (e. g. formal logic) ironic
since Poythress has written so many wonderful books applying the biblical worldview to the
nature of subjects such as mathematics, sociology, linguistics, the natural sciences, etc.
Frame acknowledged that Van Til was not always clear on the place of logic. At one point he

25 CTK, 35
26 CTK, 37
27 cf. Vern Poythress, Logic, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011
 !15

arms that we can use logic for good and necessary consequence where Scripture in
implicit.28

Theology Makes Apologeticswith a Vengeance. One of the most important things I can say at
this point is that I have absolutely no disagreement with Van Til concerning the
subordination of apologetics to dogmatic theology, and that in turn to specially revealed
theology. The influence of Calvin and Vos in particular demanded this theme. This is not
only a priority of system but of the very nature of God as Creator. On the blackboard of his
classrooms Van Til would draw his signature diagram: two circles, one larger above the other,
plenty of distinguishing space between them, yet two lines connecting them. The larger
circle on top represented God the Creator. The lower circle below represented the creation.
The lines were those of communication to show that this was not deism. And yet there was
a kind of dualism. Van Til faulted all other thought, outside of true Christianity, as being
essentially monistic. This explained why sinful man thinks he can subject God to his
standards. That is what we do with all of the other objects of our knowledge. The fact that
the we think we can do it to God betrays that we see him as part of the creation.

Confusing the Boundaries in the Sub-Disciplines of Philosophy

There are really two questions of common ground: 1. between Gods knowledge and ours; 2.
between the believers knowledge and the unbelievers knowledge.

In the first arena there is a basic dierence between Gods knowledge and ours. The
knowledge that God has is archetypal and the knowledge that we have is ectypal. The first is
unlimited, in which everything known is always known in terms of all of its relations to all
other things. In short, it is omniscience. The second is quite limited, so much so that we can
barely call it science inside of the set of omni-science. This would make our knowledge a
sub-set of Gods knowledge; but this would further imply that what set we know would be
co-extensive with that same finite set in Gods mind. For Van Til this would imply the
dasterdly conclusion that we know as much about those things as God does, for the
knowledge set is identical. This is the first part of his debate with Clark. This sort of sub-
set of omniscience does not simply maintain the law of identity (as Clark maintained) but
goes as far to make our knowledge identical to Gods knowledge. This eradicates the
Creator-creation distinction.

Now to the second arena of knowledge, that field between the knowledge of the believer
and the knowledge of the unbeliever. This was the second half of the Van Til - Clark debate.

28 cf. Frame, VTtT, 30

 !16

It is not that unbelievers cannot know facts. It is that they cannot know them by virtue of
their ultimate commitments. The metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of the unbeliever
are incompatible with the many truths to which the unbeliever assents. Moreover Van Til
held to common grace; but he located it within the covenant that God made with Adam.
Thus the knowledge of things is always covenantal knowledge. In our day K. Scott Oliphint
even suggests a name-change to Covenantal Apologetics on the basis of Van Tils
reasoning.

There is also a moral dimension to knowledgeor epistemology is ethical. One cannot separate
the commitments of our heart (ethics) from the direction of our mind (epistemology), nor in
turn from the objects (metaphysics) in that view. In other words, epistemology is holistic.
No aspect of it can be so easily compartmentalized.

We can certainly agree that the three sub-disciplines of philosophy are inseparable from
each other: that they are perspectives on each other, to borrow from Frame. But can we not
also say that they may [must] be distinguished without being divorced? Why must we accept
the subtle suggestion that to distinguish them is to divorce them?

Van Tils Epistemology Proper. First we should examine a point at which Van Til could be called
prophetic in light of postmodernitys critique of modernisms prejudice against prejudice.
For Van Til standards of truth always exist within systems of truth. This point has been well
clarified by Frames treatment of circular reasoning.29 One can only ever evaluate a truth
claim by criteria that are presupposed by his system. When the Christian puts forth the
Bible as his norming norm, he is not doing anything dierently in this sense than any other
view must.

We must ask whether the language of circular reasoning is really the best to express this
concept. Students of basic logic will recognize the fallacy of circular reasoning. It occurs
when we assume in one of our premises that which we are trying to conclude. Sometimes
presuppositionalists will justify using this language more broadly by making a distinction
between a vicious circle and a more virtuous circle.

Now there is that aforementioned ethical dimension to this epistemological reality. What
we reason from, in terms of our intellectual categories criteria, is equated by the Van Tillian
school with terms of our allegiance or sense of obligation to a personal [or impersonal]
authority. To speak of intellectual preconditions is to speak entirely about authorities. No
doubt the two ultimately come together. But one senses a category mistake brewing. It gets

29 cf. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God, 9-14; The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 130-132
 !17

thicker when we explain this equation in terms of more familiar Reformed theological
categories, such as that of the covenant.

There are only two kinds of thinkers: covenant keepers and covenant breakers. Those who
stand in a violent relationship to Gods covenant are never neutral toward the objects of
thought. True enough (cf. Romans 1:18-32). While this has the advantage of subordinating an
aspect of epistemology to the Bible, there remains the disadvantage of a truncated
definition of epistemology to begin with. If one is debating whether or not the knowledge
that God possesses may be revealed so as to constitute objects of knowledge that are
outside of our minds, then it begs the question to confine knowledge to what all those in
Adam know. The set All those in Adam are all of finite minds. Such a conception, while
rooted in biblical theology, is not open to the possibility of knowledge being first and
foremost objective in Gods mind and thus revealed. If on the other hand a Van Tillian can
accept this point that objects of knowledge are primarily known by God then he must
surrender his reduction of knowledge to being only what those in the covenant know, and by
implication how they do in knowing it.

So Van Til speaks of the believer and unbeliever doing radically dierent things with 2 + 2 =
4. No doubt many implications of this knowledge can be imagined. No doubt many
believers and unbelievers have speculated and inferred and dug back into their
presuppositions concerning this mathematical truth. But the truth (x) of the proposition
itself: is this really equivalent to what persons A and B do with x? It would seem as if Van
Til and the presuppositionalists are in the habit, at this point, of confusing objects of
knowledge per se with the various actions of subjects upon that knowledge or at least the
manifold morphings of that knowledge set given (a) finitude and (b) sin. This is a serious
equivocation.

There is another possibility. Van Til speaks of two senses to the word knowledge30 used
by the biblical authors. One regards the creation and renders the sinner guilty, the other is
redemptive and spiritual. Van Til wants to stress the noetic effect of sin, that is the
corruption of the mind which suppresses the truth in unrighteousness (cf. Rom. 1:18). What
comes into clarity, especially in his treatment of Lutheran and Arminian theologies, is that
Van Til understands epistemology soteriologically. Now let me be clear that I do not deny
that mans existential relationship to God is going to determine what he sets his mind upon.
But with Van Til we do not have a healthy intersection between epistemology and
soteriology. We have a confusion of categories. What we find in the Van Tillian confusion of

30 CTK, 45
 !18

philosophical categories, then, is a simultaneous confusion of those categories in philosophy

with certain doctrines of theology, especially with respect to the doctrine of salvation.

In Van Tils philosophical translation of his theological heritage, metaphysics was

functionally translated to common ground and epistemology to antithesis. One was
restricted and the other the moral duty that followed. Because the sinful creature never
means the same thing [metaphysics] as God, and because the unbeliever never means the
same thing [metaphysics] as the believer, the proper stance against the unbelieving
interpretation is antithesis. Could we summarize Van Til by saying that there is a common
ground out there in general revelation, but not a common ground in here where
reasoning about that revelation is done?

What all could it mean that believer and unbeliever share no epistemological common ground? If
Billy Believer hears from Suzie Skeptic that A thing must be logically consistent with itself
and logically consistent with its necessary preconditions, is Billy at war with his biblical
commitments if he assents? That would be nonsense! A Van Tilian would reply, Ah, but it is
Suzie who is being inconsistent with her presuppositions. Point granted but what of it?
Let us simply answer the question. And it is a question of first-order epistemology, or, of the
metaphysics of knowledge: Is that proposition uttered by Suzie a true proposition (quite
independent of Suzies consistency or Billys assent) Yes or no? The classicalist insists that
the only proper Christian answer and the only proper rational answer are one and the same.
The answer is YES!

The Van Tillian Reductionism of NATURE and OBJECT to Perspective

It is impossible to read Van Til and his diverse progeny without being struck by a universal
antipathy to natural theology in general and natural law in particular. Over the past two
decades, with the rise of so-called post-foundationalist theology we detect that this
antipathy has spread to a negative redefinition of objective truth. In short, the concepts of
nature and object have fallen on hard times, and not only in the arguments of explicitly
postmodern thinkers, but also in the inherent direction of the thinking of Reformed
perspectivalists. I use the label perspectival at this point to draw a larger circle than that
which might otherwise be indicated by surveying literature on apologetics. Virtually
anywhere that epistemological considerations are in view, we now see that one can hardly be
Reformed without confessing Were all perspectivalists now!31

31 This is a rough paraphrase of D. A. Carson in Christ & Culture Revisited. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. 90
 !19

Central to the Van Tillian view of natural theology is what many regard to be the
aforementioned misreading of Thomas Aquinas. On a more popular level, such as in
Schaeers works, Aquinas philosophy had nature eating up grace. The great Catholic
thinker had an insucient view of the fall. The will was fallen, but the mind was not. In the
more extensive critique Van Til gave, Thomas doctrine of analogy depended upon the scale
of being in which God was in the same category as all other beings. God, man, and rocks
were all members of a more general class. This was an analogy between equals. But as a
matter of fact, Aquinas stated that right reasoning was always a response to divine
revelation, even citing Romans 1:19 in Question 1 of the Summa.

Now in fairness to Van Tils reading of Aquinas, there are points at which Thomas divides
between truths of reason and truths of faith. It is as if these are two divorced fields of
inquiry, one that could be conceived without the aid of divine revelation and the other that
would be wholly inaccessible but for the Scriptures and the Church. Thus there is a
Romanist apologetic that gives a nod both to the biblical interpretation and to mans
interpretation, the former in articles of faith and the latter in articles of reason. It could be
said therefore that St. Thomas brought some of this bad press upon himself. From this, Van
Til concludes, The Roman Catholic system is a system that is made up of two mutually
exclusive principles, the Christian and the non-Christian.32 But even on Thomas careless
categorization the larger Van Tillian thesis does not follow. General revelation is not the
non-Christian system. It is Gods truth outside of Scripture.

A positive note needs to be made about Van Tils doctrine of general revelation. Just as he
has been misread about the subject of common ground, so it is often said that he denied
general revelation. Not quite. He wrote that The supernatural could not be recognized for
what it was unless the natural were also recognized for what it was.33 Perhaps more
confusing to his critics is that Van Til ascribed to general revelation a few of the attributes
we often associate with special revelation. Gods speech in the whole of creation is
necessary, authoritative, sucient, and perspicuous. There is an important qualifiergeneral
revelation possesses these four things for its distinctive purposes. So general revelation is
absolutely sucient to do what Paul says it does in Romans 1. That it is not sucient to
regenerate does not mean that it is insucient per se. On this point Van Til shows greater
sophistication than in his reduction of nature to neutrality.

32 CTK, 72
33 Van Til quoted in Frame, VTtT, 24
 !20

The upshot is that a fact always needs to be explained by God himself. We might ask: What
if x fact is not explicit in the Bible? Then (1) does general revelation not operate with x? or
(2) is it improper or impious to examine xs truth or falsity? or (3) is x merely lacking in a
degree of authority, or in kind?

Take the issue of extra-biblical sources for biblical theologians. Here I am not speaking
exclusively of critical scholars. Let us cite the example of the New Perspectives on Paul.
Scholars such as Dunn, Sanders, and Wright have utilized Jewish texts in the centuries
surrounding the New Testament, the literary corpus of Second Temple Judaism. Evangelical
critics of the NPP have argued that this is suspect, at least in the sense that one cannot
make the extra-biblical normative for the biblical.34 We may choose to say that relevant
extra-biblical facts are determinative in some way for our understanding of biblical facts.
Consider for example the ABCs and 123s that is, language and quantity per se that are
not taught in Scripture but which are necessary epistemological prerequisites for
understanding the truths of Scripture. The moment we claim this, in order to give the
scholars breathing room for their sources, then it is dicult to see how we cannot do the
same for certain philosophical data. It may be argued that philosophical data is very
dierent from our own language and numerical values. But I would like to hear someone
explain that dierence without using entirely philosophical data!

Why Van Tils Heresiology and Epistemology Both Matter Today

One common theme in presuppositional literature that we have ignored thus far is the
concern about probabilistic arguments as opposed to those featuring certainty. In what
sense certain? The question over the epistemic strength of an argument has been mangled
up in some of the same equivocal webs already addressed. Whether a conclusion of an
argument follows by logical necessity or whether it is merely probable, even highly probable,
is a legitimate field of epistemology. But here again, the ordinary meaning to these words in
a logic textbook is conflated with the use of these words as psychological states. The result
is one more very unhelpful equivocation. There is no space here to argue for the place of
logical necessity in either apologetics or systematic theology. My concern here is only in how
such ideas as certainty and probability play out in contemporary religious thought,
especially in popular thought.

34 e.g. Piper. The Future of Justification, 2008; Waters. Justification and the New Perspectives on Paul, 2004
 !21

The bottom line is that Van Tillianism just does cultivate relativism unless read specifically
(and almost exclusively) for the heresiology element: if one can so compartmentalize. No
doubt many can. However, when Christians who are called into arenas of reasoning with
unbelievers encounter Van Til, the response is either to retreat from such a rational arena in
the world or else to retreat from any Reformed theology that is perceived to be associated
with Van Til. The student will either be attracted or repelled, but my own experience with
others in these conversations as well as my direct analysis of Van Til tells me that the
attraction element will produce a relativistic basis for Reformed doctrine and the repelling
element will send reflective types away from Reformed theology and toward more Arminian
classicalists, or else to Rome, or else even further out.

My own appeal to Van Til can be summarized in his sentiment that, the Lord hath
appointed us ministers of his doctrine with this proviso, that we are to be as firm in
defending as faithful in delivering it.35 There is a kind of sub-spirit of the age, a kind of false
winsomeness, that I believe casts a shadow on the next generation of Reformed ministers
and institutions. It operates under the assumption that polemical preaching, preventative
teaching (in the proper forum of course), and logically consistent dogmatics are a thing of
the past; appropriate perhaps for the early modern European scene, but not for our day.
With Van Til I must respectfully disagree point to the antithesis. No doubt the tone of a
Luther can be shed, but it seems to me that we are throwing the baby out with the
bathwater. But against Van Til I do not think the correct antithesis can be maintained by
(more irony) surrendering the concepts of nature and object and reason to the realms
of autonomy and neutrality. This all still strikes me as a more high brow Dutch brand of
fundamentalism. It is a great deal of intellectual acumen in the service of just one more anti-
intellectualism.

I am afraid that the Reformed world has embraced the wrong side of the Van Til equation and
rejected the wrong side as well. In short, we have rejected the whole intellectual impulse
behind Van Tils heresiology in the name of winsomeness and we have exalted Van Tils
epistemology in the name of biblical faithfulness. This is an ironic tradeo. I want to argue
that Van Tils epistemology actually jeopardizes winsomeness (yes, I know, there are many
counterexamples: thanks be to God!) specifically because it trains us to be suspicious of
learning anything outside of the most narrow conception of the Reformed perspective.
Conversely I would argue that it is Van Tils heresiology, broadly conceived, that preserves
biblical faithfulness by maintaining the principial role of systematic theology over the whole
house of orthodoxy.

35 Van Til quoted in Muether, 236

 !22

* * * * *

Appendix 1: How Should Van Til be Read in Light of His Context?

Like many other modern Christians, the young Van Tils church experience was immersed in
the questions of being in the changing world without getting caught up in it. However this
tension was heightened among the Dutch, since the churches transplanted from Holland
had more consciously resisted Americanization. He would learn from R. B. Kuiper and
Louis Berkhof while at Calvin. Once at Princeton, he would have John Murray as a
classmate and Geerhardus Vos and J. Gresham Machen as professors. He had just missed B.
B. Warfield, who had died the year before his arrival.

The passing of the baton from Machen to Van Til at the new Westminster Theological
Seminary had the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as its backdrop. These men
believed that the legacy of conservative American Presbyterianism was being handed on to
them. Today such a sentiment would be considered arrogant. No doubt it was considered so
then too. However this sense of responsibility is one of the laudable things about Van Til in
my judgment.

As with any seminal thinker we will be more ready to understand them by discovering what
ideas influenced them. The first influence is the easiest to show. Van Til came to America
among the younger generation aected by the Afscheiding, which was a secession movement
with the Dutch Reformed Church. Its leader Abraham Kuyper held out Calvinism as the
only genuine antithesis to the Enlightenment. This is a crucial point to remember when
coming to grips with Van Til. The rationale goes all the way back to the first philosophers in
Greece. Only a view that unifies all of the diverse things we see in the world can possibly be
true and provide sucient motive for the good life. We have not improved upon the pagans
by our Christian system if there is no sucient Being at the center of it all and as the End
of it all. The Calvinistic doctrine of God made sense of everything from church dogma to
art to politics to science. Although the word worldview comes, technically, out of the
German Enlightenment, the appropriation of the concept by this Dutch Neo-Calvinism was
envisioned as the only alternative to facing Modernism.

But all was not a seamless garment. So the first paradox of Van Til can also be located back
in Kuyper. It is the central paradox. Let us state it like this: (A) the truth of Christ is over all
things and (B) whatever is not in the Christian system is not true. The word whatever in
 !23

the latter proposition must be queried. Now if this paradox comes to consistently mean that
(A) all truth is Gods truth and that (B) all other claims to be true are, in reality, false, well then
we can all agree. But we can only do so by resolving the paradox, not to merely revel in it.
The other thing one could mean by this paradox is that whatever is true in the God-
interpreted system is true and whatever is true in the merely man-interpreted
(autonomous reason) system is really false. The concept of true must not be allowed as a
neutral class, or genus, that stands above the Christian and non-Christian circles of truth in
which particular species of true things exist. The issue of whether predicates such as true
could have univocal meaning (one-to-one identity), as opposed to equivocal meaning (no
identity), was at the heart of the ClarkVan Til debate. As later commentators, such as
Frame, have pointed out, Van Til was not guilty of arming equivocal meaning between
ideas and things anymore than Clark was guilty of arming completely univocal meaning.
What Van Til did want to press was the Creator / creation distinction, which he believed
was compromised to the degree that we confuse our knowledge of a truth with Gods
knowledge of that same truth.

Muether refers to the paradox as one between antithesis and common grace,36 and regards
it as a strength to Van Tils thought, not a weakness. That the two go together is a biblical
truth. We might ask whether the Van Tillian synthesis winds up communicating not so
much a paradox of the two, but a contradiction. If the latter, then we would expect a
resultant tension between the two: some preferring antithesis to common grace and others
vice-versa. Van Til himself inclined himself toward one side, as Muether remarks that he
tended toward more antithetical and confessional emphasis and was less interested in social
or political transformation than in preserving sound doctrine.37 Later on it is suggested that
he more fully rejected the Kuyperian doctrine.38 That is, he tended to shun categories that
were borrowed from common grace, in spite of the fact that, out of the other side of his
mouth, he was saying that the unbeliever is the one borrowing from the truth of God.
This begs the question as to whose property common grace really is. Is it primarily enemy
occupied territory or is it primarily a stewardship of God to his people? If it is the latter,
then calling this neutral territory because of how the enemy treats it is to make a very
ironic concession.

Van Tils comparison of Aquinas to Kuyper is helpful at least in understanding what he took
from the latter. In form at least Kuyper would therefore agree with Aquinas when he says

36 Muether, 25, 26
37 Muether, 37
38 cf. Muether, 155
 !24

that the supernatural or spiritual does not destroy but perfects nature. But Kuypers ideas of
the natural and the supernatural are quite dierent from those of Aquinas. For Aquinas the
natural is inherently defective; it partakes of the nature of non-being. Hence sin is partly at
least to be ascribed to finitude. For Kuyper the natural as it came from the hand of God is
perfect.39 Once again there is a blurring of epistemology and soteriology as he draws
inferences from this. The upshot for Aquinas was that grace works to perfect nature, to
complete its natural trajectory. For Kuyper the special principle of grace was independent of
nature and could therefore judge nature, while not being judged by it. The extreme of this
was Kuypers seeming condemnation of apologetics.

The second clear influence on Van Til comes from the other great Dutch theologian at the
turn of the century, Herman Bavinck. In the Prolegomena section of his Reformed Dogmatics
he sometimes seems of two minds when it comes to the classical notion of objective truth.
Bavinck was clearly trying to criticize the ethical theologians who followed Kant through
the nineteenth century. He condemned the wider scope of modern theologians for ascribing
to reason the right to determine what is revelation.40 Van Til read Bavinck to be so
suspicious of Romes embrace of the modern worldview, that anything its philosophy
touched must be inseparable from modernism.

What is less clear is the sense in which nineteenth century Continental philosophy
principally from the fountainheads of Kants subjectivism and Hegels idealism trickled
through the Dutch forerunners, as well as 1920s Princeton, to Van Til. Those who are
unfamiliar with the history of Western philosophy may fail to appreciate just how much
everyone after Kant is influenced by his divide between what he called the noumenal, to
which belonged metaphysical essence, or, the way things really are, and below that line the
phenomenal, to which belonged the physical world of external appearances. Van Til does
show conscious rejection of Kants ultimate denial of knowledge, as evidenced by his
constant armation that the Christian system gives us both the that and the what of a
things reality a two point breakdown that those familiar with Kantian thought will
associate with those noumenal and phenomenal realms. But there are other elements of
Kants Critique that we might want to keep in mind. I refer especially to the universality of
truth, reasoned about with other minds, the denial of such, and therefore the necessity of
presupposing foundational truths for the purpose of practical reason.

39 CTK, 233
40 Van Til, CTK, 176
 !25

Now some critics have falsely imagined that Van Til was never trained in philosophy. But
that is not quite the case. He was admitted to Princetons PhD program in that field. The
question is not the whether of philosophy but the which. His mentor was one A. A. Bowman,
an idealist and personalist.41 I am not suggesting that the student received an overhaul in the
structure of his thought at this point. Perhaps it was only a matter of lingo; but it may be
instructive that the dissertation was titled God and the Absolute. Of course Van Til would
mean something radically dierent than Hegel by that word. Just so, a classical apologist
may mean something radically dierent than Hume by nature, or very dierent than
Descartes by reason, or utterly dierent than the Enlightenment as a whole by objective.
If we extend this charity about words to Van Til, why should those in Van Tils tradition not
aord the same charity toward their classical brethren?

I said that Van Til was trained in philosophy contrary to what many of his critics have
suggested though Muether acknowledges about his career as a whole: Van Til was not a
Christian philosopher; he rarely strayed beyond theology in his writings or in the
classroom.42 Instead Van Til was happy to laud two contemporary Dutch thinkers as the
real philosophers of his movement: Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Hendrik Theodoor
Volenhoven. A careful look into their own projects shows that they conceived their projects
as swimming against the current of a Neo-Kantian renewal, and yet the same acceptance of
Kants main thesis is uncritically accepted by them. Van Til flatly denied that he was an
Idealist. Charges that he was essentially innovating on the basis of Hegel prompted him to
write Christianity and Idealism.

Go back to how Van Til resolved the tension between System and Anti-System (or Paradox).
The two cannot finally contradict, though he would not appeal to mans logic to find what
is finally non-contradictory. Instead there was the further truth which God may or may not
have revealed to us. At this point it is rather dicult for anyone conversant in the history of
philosophy to not be scratching the chin and wondering whether or not one has just seen a
Synthesis progressing from a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between a Thesis and an
Antithesis. A mental image may even come to mind of an A at bottom left, and then a ~A
standing across at bottom right, and then an arrow moving up and to the right, into the
future toward an Absolute: becoming a higher truth than the old logic of being. What I am
saying is not that Van Til was a closet Hegelian. I am only suggesting that if we must cut
o extra-biblical objects of truth, such as traditional Western logic, then there are not many
models left from which to work. There is another clue to this in Van Tils uneasiness with

41 cf. Muether, 57
42 Muether, 154
 !26

Schaeers treatment of Hegel. In several of his books, the student of Van Til spoke of a
shift happening with Hegels dialectic. Prior to Hegel our thinking was linear and logical. A
thing was either true or false, A or ~A, and so forth. Van Til was very clear that it is a mistake
to try to fight modern thought with pre-modern (or medieval) thoughtfor that is only to
replace post-Christian autonomy with classical pagan autonomy. Schaer got a few things
wrong, to be sure, but his basic treatment of Hegels legacy was not one of them. And we
have a right to wonder how much of the Kantian and Hegelian influence determined the
unconscious framework of even very intelligent Christians who had never given themselves
to studying what exactly was wrong with these late modern philosophical giants.

There is also an influence from Warfield on the relationship between Calvinism and
Christianity. Both held that Calvinism is the most consistent expression of the Christian
faith and that for the faith to endure and expand in terms of its implications, it would
require its Calvinistic proponents to do that work. Van Til tended to draw this inference
with more defensiveness than Warfield. To the degree that a Christian expression was not
self-consciously Reformed, such currency would be debased and begin to disintegrate the
system. What did Van Til think of Warfields criticisms of Kuyper? The Princeton school
took a positive approach to apologetics while the Amsterdam school was moving in the
opposite direction. At certain points, he argued, it seems as though Warfield is altogether
ignoring the fact that there is a dierence of principle between those who work from the
basis of regeneration and those who do not.43

Finally there is the influence of Geerhardus Vos. No doubt this concerned the matter of
deriving ones system from the flow of the Bible itself. And yet if anyone will take the
trouble to read the prolegomena material of this forerunner of biblical theology, one will
find Vos speaking as a classicalist at every point! It is a matter of wonder whether some Van
Tillians have carefully read these parts. Vos drew a sharp distinction between pure
philosophy which uses reason properly and rationalism, which sets up the individual
subject as the authority. He adds that Biblical theology must likewise recognize the
objectivity of the groundwork of revelation. This means that real communications came
from God and man ab extra.44 Van Til, Frame, et all will acknowledge the priority of general
revelation, but will bristle at speaking of it as consisting in objects of the mind as if to
make objective truth independent of the subject is the same as to grant those objects
independence from any subjective interpretation. On the contrary it is only to distinguish

43 CTK, 240
44 Vos, Biblical Theology, 12
 !27

between its exact nature in Gods infinite-subjective interpretation (which is the infallible
object) as opposed to the finite subjective interpretation of the creaturely mind.

Clear and Pervasive Goals.

Muether insists that we approach Van Tils method from within an ecclesial context.45 It
may strike us as odd that Machen had taken such trouble to appoint the young Van Til to be
the first apologetics professor at Westminster given the elder scholars more classical bent.
But the two men shared one academic burden in common: that of defending the
Confessions brand of the Reformed faith against the modern worldview. On that score they
were two peas in a pod. Possibly the urgency of getting the new seminary on the map,
combined with more controversy with the Presbytery, and then Machens sudden death in
1938 it may be that such myriad circumstances prevented what would have otherwise
been an eventual conflict between the two over the doctrine of primal knowledge. There is a
hint of such a potential from some private comments by fellow faculty member Allan
MacRae. There may have been harmful eects discerned by Machen.46 But again, those on
either side of the debate who think that disagreement was essentially over apologetic
method are still not getting to the heart of the matter.

We could put things in this way. In order to carry on the Princetonian eorts at defending
orthodoxy against erosion, Van Til restricted apologetics to that dogmatic project. If all that
this meant was keeping apologetics firmly within the confines of the biblical system, then
there could hardly be debate among the Reformed. On the other hand, what if the Van
Tillian dogmatic restriction of apologetics began to sacrifice rational epistemology per se?
What if, in an otherwise commendable fixation to prevent autonomous reasoning and
neutral nature, we begin to equivocate the terms of universal truth (i.e. over all) as if
everything in its class really must mean commonly conceived truth (i.e. in all or by all)?
This is precisely how presuppositionalism has taught its devotees to define natural theology
in general and natural law in particular: as if the field of nature was claiming to be true by
virtue of its agreeableness to the relevant pool of finite minds. But this is precisely not what
natural theology and natural law had always meant in the classical model. No doubt the
Enlightenment thinkers began to speak of natural theology and natural law as principles of
common reason, by which the subject (the reason-er) was on center stage.

45 Muether, 16
46 cf. Muether, 68
 !28

This inward turn of epistemology, which finds its wellspring in Kant, is what so concerned
critics of Van Til among the Reformed. I am not here interested in criticisms of
presuppositionalism from contemporary theistic philosophers who are largely Arminian or
Roman Catholic. For the most part they are guilty as charged; nor have they taken the
trouble to actually read Van Til and his school with any seriousness. In many cases they have
never read him at all.47 Rather I mean to dust o the shelf what Dr. Sproul had in mind, in
the opening remarks of his debate with Bahnsen: namely, that the Van Tillian school of
thought brings us perilously near something like Neo-Orthodoxy: their forefathers critique
of Barthianism notwithstanding.

A small puzzle piece of modern church history remains. Why did Machen so delight in
having Van Til lead the charge at the new Westminster Seminary, despite their potential
dierences? The most obvious answer is that their methods did not dier so much after all.
That is one possible answer. However that may have been true, I think that the answer has
more to do with the primacy of place given to the younger mans stated intentions to defend
the truth of the Confession as a whole. In other words, it would seem that Machens
reservations about Van Tils epistemology were set aside by Van Tils heresiology. Machen
would not live to see whether his bargain would pay o.

By treating the worth of ideas as all or nothing propositions, Van Tillian epistemology
trains its devotees to reject much that is valuable in individual theologians and traditions
that cannot tow the Van Til line across the board. There are good and bad ways to think in
terms of the total system.

The fact that Bahnsen claimed Van Til as the genesis of his reconstructionist brand of
theonomy and that Jay Adams would do the same for his nouthetic counseling does not
prove that we should lay all the blame that we want to assign at the feet of Van Til. On the
other hand, the lines of inference are not coincidental.

Appendix 2 - Hope for a Future Synthesis?

What do you Start With? An Exercise in Talking Past Each Other

Apparently leading up to their 1991 debate on all these matters, R. C. Sproul and Greg
Bahnsen concluded to each other in a private conversation that there was a whole lot talking

47 As stated earlier, there are a few points at which Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsley may have overreached in their
criticism as well. As Frame rightly points out (CVT, ), Van Til was careful to affirm a common ground of reasoned
truths between believer and unbeliever. Whether he was consistent with the implications is another matter.
 !29

past each other. When one is talking about metaphysics, the other is talking about method;
when one switches back to the other, now the other is talking about moral obligation. Not
that these spheres of thought can be divorced from each other, but without distinguishing
them we can be as uncharitable as we are inaccurate. That is one of the great recurring
viruses embedded into the modern history of this debate. When warring schools of
apologetics draw attention to starting point they typically (though not exclusively) tend to
focus on the subjective starting point: (1) How is he defining that word / understanding
that concept? or else (2) What are his assumptions behind that line of reasoning? or else (3)
What are his ultimate presuppositions upon which the whole thing rests? It is to Van Tils
credit especially that such attention has been shifted to that third question of subjective
starting point. However the objective starting point is lost in the shue.

In fact the words objective starting point are less helpful than saying what classical
thinkers are really trying to get back to, and that is the necessary preconditions for any
particular thing. That necessary precondition is an object of knowledge, and as such is not a
mere subjective perspective. It is perceived via subjective perspective, but it cannot be
reduced to it without implying total agnosticism.

Beyond starting points are end points. What are we driving at in our interaction with the
world? Van Til argues from Romans 1:20 that nothing less than total surrender48 is
mandated. The unbeliever already knows deep down not simply that there is a God, but
the God who is. Sproul would agree with that. But from the same principle the classicalist
will see fruit in common experience and the Van Tillians will insist that this God and his
terms of peace can only be found in Scripture. Since both sides really do arm the opposite
proposition, the dierence is one of emphasis. Consequently, the distance between them
can perhaps be overcome.

48 CTK, 226-227
 !30

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frame, John. Cornelius Van Til: An Assessment of His Thought. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian &
Reformed Publishing. 1995

Frame, John. Van Til: the Theologian. Phillipsburg, NJ: Pilgrim Publishing Co. 1976

Muether, John R. Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman. Phillipsburg, NJ:
Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 2008

Sproul, R. C., John Gerstner, & Arthur Lindsley. Classical Apologetics. Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan. 1984

Van Til, Cornelius. A Christian Theory of Knowledge. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian &
Reformed Publishing. 1969

Van Til, Cornelius. Christian Apologetics. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed
Publishing. 2003

Van Til, Cornelius. An Introduction to Systematic Theology. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian &
Reformed Publishing. 2007