1 - R. J. Rushdoony - by What Standard PDF

An analysis of the
PHILOSOPHY OF CORNELIUS VAN TIL

An analysis of the
PHILOSOPHY OF CORNELIUS VAN TIL
ROUSAS JOHN RUSHDOONY
ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

Vallecito, CA
1995
Copyright 1958 by Rousas John Rushdoony
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

without permission in writing from the publisher
Printed in the United States of America
Reprinted 1995 ROSS HOUSE BOOKS
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-074843

ISBN: 1-879998-05-X
TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER
Foreword
Basic to this study is the belief that the presuppositions of

human thought in every field must be basically one in order to
arrive at any concept which both validates biblical faith and
human knowledge. The sovereignty of the self-contained God is
the key to every field, in that only the God of Scripture makes
all things possible and explicable and is thus the basic premise
not only of theology, but of philosophy, science and indeed all
knowledge. In that God is the Creator of all things, He is their
only valid principle of interpretation, in that they derive both
their existence and meaning from His creative act. This belief is
herein set forth in terms of various aspects of human thought.
Again basic to this study is the belief that such a philosophy
finds consistent and able exposition in the writings of Cornelius
Van Til. This work, therefore, is thus both an exposition of a
philosophy, and an exposition as well of Van Tils development
of that philosophy, a school of thought to which this writer
subscribes.
R. J. R.
THE AUTHOR
Rousas J. Rushdoony, a native of New York City, now resides in

Vallecito, California. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from the
University of California and received his theological training at
the Pacific School of Religion. An ordained minister, he has
been a missionary among Paiute and Shoshone Indians as well
as pastor of two California churches. Dr. Rushdoony is
President of Chalcedon Foundation, an educational
organization devoted to research, publishing, and to cogent
communication of a distinctively Christian scholarship to the
world at large. His writing in the Chalcedon Report and his
numerous books have spawned a generation of believers active
in reconstructing the world to the glory of Jesus Christ.
CONTENTS
Foreword vii
The Author viii
Chapter
1. Behold, it was Leah 1
2. The Christian Philosophy of Knowledge 8
3. The Emperor Has No Clothes! 19
4. The Psychology of Religion: Integration
into the Void 65
5. Ethics and the Chief End of Man 81
6. Apologetics and Self-Consciousness 100
7. The Issue in Common Grace 108
8. The Image of God and Faceless Man 122
9. The Meaning of Inspiration 135
10. Dictation and Inspiration 141
11. The Authority of Scripture 145
12. The Self-Contained God 150
13. Christology and the Void 165
14. How Wide a Gospel? 174
Appendices
1. The Sons of Leah 179
2. Van Til and Amsterdam 180
3. Bishop Butlers Analogy 184
4. By What Standard? 188
5. Biographical Note 206
6. A Van Til Bibliography 208
1.
Behold it was Leah
A certain bridegroom went joyfully to bed one night,

confident that his seven years of labor were crowned with
victory and that it was his beloved Rachel whom he embraced
in the dark of the bridal chamber, but, in the morning,
behold, it was Leah (Gen. 29:25). The woebegone bridegroom
was compelled to serve seven years more, but his additional
service did not erase the undesired bondage to Leah. It had
been sin that had placed Jacob on an unfavorable footing and
at the mercy of his calculating father-in-law, Laban. The
marriage, contracted in good faith, gave Jacob, eventually,
three undesired wives besides his Rachel, a wrangling family,
and an inheritance of trouble. The children of the unloved wives
revealed an unlovely disposition, and between them and their
father a deep rift developed which none of the fathers
pleading resolved. They were his sons, and yet they were not
his sons, for they despised his word (Gen. 34:30,31), hated the
son of his beloved Rachel (Gen. 37:4,8), defiled his marriage
bed (Gen. 35:22), and gave him more trouble than his enemies.
They were thus better sons to Laban than to believing Jacob,
the man who, having been overcome and subdued by God, had
thereby prevailed with Him (Gen. 32:24-32) and become a
prince in God.
This bit of history has particular relevance to Christian
philosophy and theology. The Christian thinker, laboring as
he often must on alien ground, has too often embraced as his
own a non-Christian principle which he believed would be
fruitful in terms of Christian thought. He has made bone of
his bones and flesh of his flesh a principle which he has believed
2 By What Standard?
would bear fruit in a Christian world-view. This resultant hybrid
world-view he believed would fall heir to this worlds substance
and show mastery and dominion over the human mind. In this
expectation, early Christian thinkers embraced Platonism; the
Scholastics, Aristotelianism; the men of the Enlightenment era
Cartesianism and Rationalism, and men of the 19th and 20th
centuries, Kantianism, existentialism, and other alien brides,
hoping thereby that in the dark they held Rachel. But, in the
morning, behold, it was Leah! The issue of such a union has
consistently been semi-alien seed which is in rebellion against
its parentage and denies it more thoroughly than its enemies
can.
The potentiality of a child cannot exceed its inheritance.
Chinese parents can only beget a Chinese child: they cannot
produce a Negro or a Dane, and all their wishing cannot make
it so. In like fashion, the potentiality of a philosophy cannot
exceed its presupposition. What a philosophy assumes to begin
with, ultimately determines all that it can be or can know. Greek
philosophy assumed, or had as its given, the physical world
and its structure as ultimate. As a result, it could not account
fo r t h o s e t h i n g s wh i ch were n o t i n cl u d ed i n i t s g i v en
or presupposition. Form and matter, it seemed to be able to
give an interpretation of, but purpose and personality escaped
it. Moreover, it felt a tension between form and matter existed;
ultimately everything had to be reduced to one or the other,
or be eliminated from consideration as unreal. As Van Til has
stated it, Basic to all the thinking of the Greeks was the
assumption that all being is at bottom one . . . To the extent
that they allowed for change at all, this change was ultimate.1
In dealing with being, with the ultimate, they began, not with
the idea of the self-contained God, but with the idea of the
self-contained character of nature. 2 Thus they looked for
being in nature, not beyond nature. As a result, every fact of
nature and all new developments revealed the possibilities and
potentialities of nature. They believed in the mysterious
universe: they were perfectly willing therefore to leave open a
place for
By What Standard? 3
the unknown but this unknown must be thought of as the
utterly unknowable and indeterminate.3 In other words, the
universe revealed God in His being; but because the universe
was characterized by change, God Himself was characterized by
change. The Greeks were ready to hear Paul speak on the
resurrection: they were ready to accept that fact as a new
indication of the potentiality of being, and therefore of man,
but they could not accept the framework in which Paul
presented that resurrection, the Almighty Creator God who is
sustainer and redeemer. In their framework, the resurrection
was another curious fact revelatory of natures possibility, and
yet revealing nothing, because nature tomorrow could reveal
something further or different. Since nature was being, and this
being changed, there was no ultimate truth, finally, except
change, and the only authority was mans expert experience of
this change in the noumenal realm. Thus Greek philosophy
could not understand or accept the Gospel; it was to them
foolishness (I Cor. 1:23).
The tragedy that ensued, however, was that early Christian
thought wedded itself to the Leah of Greek philosophy in the
hopes of producing a Christian world-view. But a philosophy
which begins with matter, structure or change as its ultimate
and starting point can never result in a delineation of the ways
of the self-contained Creator of nature. Christian thought has
consistently gone astray, throughout most of its history, by
seeking to answer the world in terms of the world's own
categories. It has assumed that it must marry Leah to speak
either to Leah or Laban and has ended only in sad bondage to
both.
This was exactly the course which Roman Catholicism took.
It tried to unite the Christian doctrine of grace to the Greek
concept of nature, understood as a unity of form and matter.
In Thomas Aquinas the classical statement of this union is
found, and the result is that God is virtually identified with
nature as phenomenal reality to man.4 The God of
Scholasticism is nature analyzed into substance (God the Father),
structure (God the Son), and act (God the Holy Ghost). The
Christian
4 By What Standard?
terminology fails to give Christian life and character, however,
to an essentially Greek world-view. Any logical development of
Scholastic thought dissolves the Christian claims into bare
immanentism; God is swallowed up by nature. And
rationalism, the authority of mans reason, assumes full
jurisdiction. The tragic position of the Roman Church is that
it must attempt the role of Canute and say what that monarch
could not seriously say to the sea: thus far and no further. Rome
would arrest by decree the very forces it has unleased, and its
decree has consistently failed in its purpose.
To deny God as ultimate means to affirm man as ultimate.
To make nature the container of God is finally to make man
God's container. Whenever Christian philosophy has had any
other starting point than the self-contained God, it has led,
despite its protestations, to a man-contained God. In the
morning, it finds itself in bed with Leah.
This was clearly seen in Cartesian thought. Descartes, after
all, was the natural son of Scholasticism. He revealed honestly
and clearly the implications of its hybrid nature. Descartes
began, not with the self-contained God of Scripture, but
with the self-contained man. The starting point of his
philosophy was Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am.
From this point of origin, Descartes went on to prove the
existence of nature and the existence of God. For Scholasticism,
nature had been the starting point, and God the object to be
proved. Now nature itself joins the ranks of objects and man
alone is the presupposition. The tension is no longer nature and
grace but man and nature, with God as an adjunct of both.
Berkeley and Hume successively challenged the objective
reality of nature and God; after all, the only real knowledge
man had was of his own thinking. All inferences beyond that
failed to give a proven objective realm of nature, or God. The
only valid rational and empirical data was the human
consciousness. Kant attempted to save for man the objects God
and the world by destroying the subject-object concepts to all
practical intent, and creating in autonomous man a macrocosm
containing both God and the
By What Standard? 5
world. Man thus contains both God and the world and
destroys the subject-object relationship. God and nature are
now man-contained; this is the basic assumption of
existentialism, for in such thinking, as exemplified in Barth and
Brunner, man as the Individual takes the place of the
ontological Trinity . . . in it being is exhausted in relation and
relation is exclusively internal.8 Thus a new God comes into
play, celebrated by theologians and poets as the true God. This
God, as Babette Deutsch says of Rilke's God in The Book of
Hours, is not the Creator of the universe, but seems rather the
creation of mankind, and above all, of that most intensely
conscious part of mankind, the artists. As Rilke himself
stated it,
What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your pitcher, broken lie?
When I, your drink, go stale or dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
You lose your meaning, losing me.6
The basic issue, therefore, has not changed since Eden. The
temptation of man is To be as God, knowing, that is,
determining for himself what shall be good and what shall be
evil. Man establishes his own law and decrees his own
righteousness and is not bound to a point of reference beyond
himself. This is the original sin of man, the lust to be as God,
and this is the constant drive of his being from which even the
redeemed are not free. Man sees himself not as creature but as a
god, not as dependent but as an independent and autonomous
being. Not even the most devout are free in this life from traces
of this rebellion. Nor is a belief in the inspiration of Scripture a
guarantee of immunity. We have, after all, groups such as
the Seventh Day Adventists and the Church of Rome, which
affirm plenary inspiration while insisting on mans efficacious
works and autonomous reason. Nor is Calvinism affirmed a
sufficient safeguard: the very belief in predestination has been
used as a potent weapon of self-righteousness, as Burns
Holy Willie's
6 By What Standard?
Prayer so effectively satirizes. The sad fact is that much of
Calvinism in our day is mere traditionalism, the faith of the
fathers affirmed as a part of ones heritage and without any
vitality or insight.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the most emphatic
opposition to the Calvinism of Van Til (as well as Dooyeweerd,
and others) has come from men who are ostensibly Calvinist
leaders: the integrity of Van Tils Calvinism exposes the
inconsistency and the betrayal inherent in their thinking. Hence
the heat of their attack. Jesse De Boer and Orlebeke, for
example, are profoundly disturbed that Van Til begins with the
self-contained God of Scripture instead of mans reason and the
self-contained facts of this physical universe. From these facts,
they would prove God, but any God that is added to a universe
of self-contained facts is irrelevant to it. Because Van Til begins
with the self-contained and ontological trinity, James Daane is
disturbed and asks, Why does he himself select one aspect of
God and exalt it to the highest principle of interpretation for
every problem? Why does he not allow God's virtues to become
an integral part of his principal of interpretation? 7 But if we
turn aside from God as being, the self-contained, ontological
trinity to God as value, to the virtues of God as related to the
world, then we have lost God as God. He becomes only a value
of the ultimate and self-contained universe and as such has no
relationship to the God of Scripture.
Such men as Daane have not only embraced Leah, but, in
the morning, are insistent that she is Rachel and denounce all
who say otherwise!
In the chapters which follow, an analysis of the
Christian-theistic philosophy of Cornelius Van Til is made. In
his epistemologically self-conscious Calvinism we have a
consistent Christianity which significantly and effectively
challenges not only the non-Christian philosophies of our time,
but lays bare the failure of all ostensibly Christian thought
which attempts to gain Christian fruit out of alien roots,
which begins with
By What Standard? 7
any presupposition other than the self-contained and triune God
of Scripture, and whose starting point is fact rather than the
ontological trinity.
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: Paul at Athens (See Appendix regarding all Van Til titles).
2. C. Van Til: The Infallible Word, Nature and Scripture. p. 275.
3. C. Van Til: Paul at Athens.
4. C. Van Til: Infallible Word, p. 282.
5. C. Van Til: The New Modernism, p. 275.
6. Rilke: Poems from the Book of Hours, pp. 29, 81 (New Directions Press,
Norfolk, Conn.).
7. J. Daane: A Theology of Grace, p. 102f. (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich.)
2.
The Christian Philosophy of Knowledge
Epistemology, or the philosophy of knowledge, has its

representative modern thinker in Descartes. Ren Descartes, a
French mathematician and philosopher, approached the problem
of knowledge with a background which included eight years in
a Jesuit school, military experience, a knowledge of the
Renaissance and the sciences, and extensive travel. Yet in
approaching the world philosophically, he acted as though he
were in effect a new-born babe or a visitor to this world, i.e.,
without presuppositions, having no knowledge of anything
except himself and under necessity of ascertaining the nature of
a strange new world. Is such a procedure philosophically valid?
Is it at all possible to ask how we know without having
previously presupposed what we know? Descartes began with
the presupposition of the autonomous human reason; for him,
God and the world were problems, but he himself was not.
While the rationalism of Descartes is now out of date, his
emphasis on autonomous man is not. Descartes procedure is
still basic: he defined and identified man in terms of himself,
without reference to any outside fact or being, and then
proceeded to define the world and God in terms of autonomous
man. In terms of this procedure, Kant and existentialism
became inevitable; autonomous man became the basic principle
of definition and identification, and both God and the world
were relative to man. The self-contained and sovereign God,
together with His eternal decree, becomes anathema to man.
God exists, for the neo-orthodox theologians, in terms of the
divine-human encounter, and they oppose the orthodox idea of
the self-contained and triune God.
8
By What Standard? 9
As Van Til has pointed out, Barth argues that God's
transcendence means His freedom to become wholly identical
with man and to take man up into complete identification with
himself.1 Existentialism thus identifies God in terms of His
relation to man and manifests hostility to the idea of a
self-contained ontological trinity. God is thus permitted little
or no independent existence and is reduced to an existentialist
relationship to autonomous man. Theology is accordingly
dialectical, conversational; God speaks and acts, but exhausts
Himself in His acting and speaking, in His relationship to man.
The existentialist can therefore agree that God was in Christ
exhaustively because relationally.
How did theology and philosophy enter into so perverse a
position? The absurdity of Descartes starting point gives us a
clear indication of this. When Descartes began by asking, How
do we know? and answered by declaring his point of origin to
be cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am, he had already
presupposed what he knew. The orthodox Christian, who begins
with the doctrine of the Triune God as taken from the infallible
Scriptures, is assumed to be prejudiced and ignorant, in that he
has already assumed all that supposedly needs proof. But the
modern man who begins with his own autonomous nature and
establishes his reason as the unprejudiced and valid interpreter
of God and the world has in fact assumed far more. If God did
indeed create heaven and earth and all things therein, then
nothing can have any meaning or interpretation apart from God.
Inasmuch as all things came into being by virtue of His sovereign
decree, all things have meaning only in terms of His eternal
counsel. The only true interpretation of any fact, including
man, is in terms therefore of God the Creator and providential
Controller. The orthodox Christian position, as upheld by
consistent Calvinism, is that God is the Creator and therefore
the interpreter: therefore, the only possible point of origin or
departure is the triune God and the infallible Scriptures. If
man is the interpreter, as modern philosophy and theology
maintain, then all things, including God and the world as
well as other
10 By What Standard?
men, have their being existentially, not independently, and
constitute a relation to and an encounter with the autonomous
man. Thus the Christian theory of knowledge rests on the
Christian theory of being, and the non-Christian theory of
knowledge rests on a non-Christian theory of being. As Van Til
has observed, our theory of knowledge is what it is because our
theory of being is what it is. As Christians we cannot begin
speculating about knowledge by itself. We cannot ask how we
know without at the same time asking what we know.2
Autonomous man assumes that the interpretation of reality
is his function without reference to God, and therefore
proceeds to compare his ideas with reality. Historically, this
process has been worked out in Descartes, Berkeley and Hume
to the conclusion that man never knows reality except by his
ideas of reality. The question then arises, is there any valid
reason for believing that as I think so reality is? The Kantian
answer is determinative of modern philosophy:
things-in-themselves can never be known. Our knowledge is
confined to phenomena, things as they appear to us, never
reaching the thing in itself. The question, Is the structure of
my thought a correct account of the structure of the world? is
dropped as an impossible one. Whitehead declares, We must
not slip into the fallacy of assuming that we are comparing a
given world with given perceptions of it. The physical world is,
in some general sense of the term, a deduced concept. Our
problem is, in fact, to fit the world to our perceptions, and not
our perceptions to the world. 3 There is in this position a
seeming and deceptive humility which is in actuality a perverse
pride. Man's insistence that he has no valid knowledge of reality
in itself, his attempts to eliminate causality, order and design
while assuming them at every turn, constitute an attempt to
resist any interpretation other than that of autonomous man.
The Christian must maintain that created being has no
meaning in itself and all attempts to understand it in terms of
itself constitutes a rejection of true meaning. Neither can man
have meaning in himself, because he too is a creature. Nothing
can
By What Standard? 11
have meaning in itself or of itself because nothing exists in or
of itself. All things were made by Him, and nothing has a
valid interpretation apart from God and His creative and
redemptive purpose. Thus every attempt of man to interpret his
world of itself, or to attempt to interpret it in terms of his
autonomous mind and its perceptions, is virtually a deliberate
rejection of God and His interpretation. When men reject God
they at the same time virtually reject the Creators and
redeemers interpretation and purpose for their lives and for all
creation. Thus, they cannot understand either themselves or
the world they live in, although they use both, often with
profligate proficiency. As Van Til has pointed out, if we say that
the natural man cannot truly know God, then we must also say
that he cannot truly know the flowers of the field.
Unless we maintain that the natural man does not know the
flowers truly, we cannot logically maintain that he does not know
God truly. All knowledge is inter-related. The created world is
expressive of the nature of God. If one knows nature truly, one also
knows natures God truly. Then, too, the mind of man is a unit. It
cannot know one thing truly without knowing all things truly.
It will not do to say that the natural man knows nothing of God,
though he knows many other things well. Nor is it even sufficient to
say that the natural man does know of the existence of God but
does not know anything about the character of God. The existence
of God is the existence of the character.4
An objective revelation of God is given to man, both through
the world about him and through his own created nature, upon
which Gods impress is unmistakeable. But this knowledge man
seeks to suppress. Instead, in his starting point, method, and
conclusion, man takes for granted his own ultimacy, insists on
being his own god and interpreter, and as a result misinterprets
all things, himself, the flowers of the field and Almighty God.
Both in its existence and in its meaning, the whole space-time
world is dependent upon God, who created it out of nothing.
Its life and meaning are derivative, and as a result the meaning
of every fact in the universe must be related to God. 5 It fol-
lows, therefore, that to know any fact truly, man must first
presuppose the existence of God and His creative and
redemptive plan. The facts can be related to laws, because
behind facts and laws stands God, relating and giving meaning
to both by His plan for the universe. Both the one and the many,
the universals and the particulars, are derivative and
dependent upon the triune God, who is the original and
ultimate One and Many. If we are to have coherence in our
experience, there must be a correspondence of our experience
to the eternally coherent experience of God. Human knowledge
ultimately rests upon the internal coherence within the
Godhead; our knowledge rests upon the ontological trinity as
its presupposition.6 Because man is a creature, his knowledge
cannot be exhaustive, but because he is created in God's image,
his knowledge is true.
For the non-Christian, true knowledge must be
comprehensive. Because particulars and universals are ultimate
for him, knowledge is true to the extent that it is
comprehensive and exhaustive. Moreover, the non-Christian
regards the mind of autonomous man as a valid interpreter and
as ethically normal. The Christian, on the other hand, rejects
the right of man to be an autonomous and ultimate interpreter
and holds him to be ethically depraved, so that he wilfully
suppresses true knowledge. Mans sin is his desire to be his
own god, determining on his own authority what is good and
evil. He accordingly suppresses the truth concerning God,
himself, and the world in order to buttress himself in his
rebellion.
To understand the basic difference of the consistently
Christian, the Reformed, doctrine of knowledge, as against that
of modern mans unbiased and ostensibly scientifically
impartial approach to knowledge, let us examine a statement
which seems to promise and deliver so much to orthodox
Christian faith while in actuality undercutting it.
In a commendable article in the October 1951 issue of
Theology Today William Hallock Johnson summarized some
of the main attacks on the credibility of miracles. Myth and
Miracle at Mid-Century points clearly to the unscientific and
unscholarly nature of those critics who reduce miracles to myth
on no other ground than this: they believe, a priori, that
miracles cannot occur; therefore, they did not occur, and all
evidence to the contrary is automatically mythological.
Philosophical bias, he concludes, has prevented them from
listening to competent and unimpeachable testimony. The
result is that the mythical has gained steadily and inexorably
over the historical. The skeptical critics, not the Gospels, are
the myth-makers, and Johnson finds in their complete and
confessed failure to draw a credible portrait of a
non-miraculous Jesus a strong negative argument for the
truth of the Gospel narrative.
With this thoughtful statement Calvinists can heartily agree.
Nevertheless, the matter needs to be pursued further to be fully
clarified. The fact is obvious that Strauss, Renan, Schweitzer,
Loisy and other critics whom Johnson names do have a basic
philosophical bias which re-orders their whole judgment and
determines what shall be and what shall not be a fact. But this
does not erase what is equally obvious, namely that Johnson and
Dodd and other scholars have their own bias, each in his turn
pre-determining the facts on the basis of certain philosophical
pre-suppositions. Yet each in his turn claims to be presenting
the true, unbiased, impartial, objective and scientific facts. In
this claim lies the inherently subjective nature of their
scholarship and their false claim to an objective authority.
Man neither is nor can be objective and impartial. All
his thinking is from some fundamental starting point or
presupposition which is a priori and is therefore either pure or
impure faith. Out of the millions of momentary occurences, he
selects certain data as significant or real because his point of view
pre-determines that they shall be so. All history-writing is
selective and philosophical, as witness the very different
American history which appears in Bancroft and in Beard. It is
in Dooyeweerd and Van Til that we have the decisive analysis
of the relationship between faith and fact. Such a point of view
seems to the modern mind to lead to pure relativism, because,
placing his faith in the reason of autonomous man, he cannot
tolerate
to have his centrality and authority questioned. Touch
not mine annointed, he cries, when mans final autonomy
is challenged.
Calvinism boldly accepts the relativism of mans
thinking. It clearly affirms the failure of reason, intuition,
experience, and experimentalism apart from a guiding and
valid faith. It declares that the history of epistemology, the
theory of knowledge, shows that man is unable to account
for even the normal everyday matters of experience by any
of the multitude of philosophies he has developed. The
only guarantee for the reality of our world and the validity
of our consciousness and experience is an unreserved
faith in God and His revelation, in the God of Christian
Scripture and the authority and finality of the Incarnate
Son and of His written Word. In such a faith, relativism
disappears, and the problem of epistemology is answered.
The subjectivism of man is offset by the reality of God
and of His created world. In creatureliness and rebellion
our failure and sin are made both known and limited, and
in His Triune Deity is a guarantee of reality and validity of
our created reason.
To many moderns, this unreserved faith in God and
Scripture involve a surrender of reason. That this has been
true of many forms of Roman and Arminian thought is past
denying. Likewise, many theological modernists have
surrendered reason to the vagaries of experience. True
Calvinism, as it comes to maturity in Van Til, insists only
on the surrender of reason as God and the restoration of
reason as reason in Christ. Autonomous man has given to
reason a finality and authority it does not possess. We
have given it the right to sit in judgment on God Himself
and to arraign the Trinity before the bar of reason. The true
Calvinist answer to this is that reason is not God and
possesses no such authority. Its judgments are based on the
tenuous, sinful, and subjective pre-suppositions of a
creature and are neither grounded in being or in truth.
Reason can only establish a connection with being and
truth insofar as it rests, not on its own mythical authority,
but on God and His Word.
The Westminster Confession of Faith properly begins
with
the chapter on Holy Scripture and asserts, The authority of
the Holy Scripture . . . (or of its miracles) . . . dependeth not
upon the testimony of any man, or church, but wholly upon
God, who is truth itself, the author thereof, and therefore it is
to be received, because it is the Word of God.
What depends on man and his reason or testimony, is less
than man, and what depends on God is less than God. It is reason
and man that depend on God, not God, His Word, or His
miracles, that depend on man or reason.
It is significant that the Westminister Confession contains no
chapter on man as man, but only on man in relationship to God,
through his fall, and as called and redeemed. Man's life and
reason can be properly considered by a Christian thinker only
in terms of the same relationship. Autonomous man is a myth,
and reason as created reason is part of man's relationship as
creature to God, His world, and to other men. As such, it has a
great and invaluable role. In any other capacity, it is a hindrance
and a stumbling-block.
But, one may object, why criticize Johnson when he is so
obviously congenial to the Christian belief in miracles, when he
defends the miraculous element in the New Testament? Why
draw the Christian line so hard and narrow as to leave such men
under question? Is not Van Tils Calvinism going too far in the
direction of isolation in so refining its standards? The answer
is clear-cut. Acceptance of the miraculous is not evidence of
Christianity. Many heathen peoples freely and readily give
assent to the miraculous in Christianity without being
Christians. Many American Indians, for example, are ready to
believe in the flood, in the healing miracles, the virgin birth,
and the bodily resurrection, without for a moment accepting
Christianity; such acceptance is fully in accord with their
world-view. Likewise, Aristotle could have accepted these same
miracles, redefined as new evidence of the potentiality
inherent within the universe, and rejected Christ and the God of
the Scriptures emphatically. In actuality, under any of these
points of view, the
miracles cease to be miracles in any Christian sense. More
important, there is no gain in establishing the occurence of a
miracle as an event in history if the God of that miracle is
thereby surrendered. Thus, while many Christians are ready to
accept any evidence seemingly congenial to and corroborative
of the Christian view, whether voiced by Aristotle or Johnson,
the consistent Calvinist cannot do so. No miracle is truly
established if God is not at the same time established as the
presupposition of all thought. More than that, no fact is
established unless we first of all begin with God as the Creator,
as the basic presupposition of all thought.
Johnson clearly saw the philosophical bias of Strauss, Renan,
Schweitzer, Loisy, and others, but he erroneously assumed that
he himself lacked any, that his thinking was objective and
scientific. It is not surprising that each man is in turn satisfied
with the validity of his reasoning, because it agrees with his
god, himself. If he expresses dissatisfaction with his reasoning,
it is because he has failed to realize the potentiality of reason
as he recognizes it himself. The naive confidence of philosophy
is too often masked from the average reader by an involved and
pompous vocabulary, but we need not go back to the older
philosophies to find a remarkable self-confidence in philosophers
in the objective validity of their logical processes. For example,
Rudolf Carnap, modern logical positivist, who is thoroughly
anti-metaphysical, who denies that philosophys concern is with
reality, declaring that metaphysical proportionslike lyrical
versehave only an expressive function, but no representative
function, can nevertheless say, our doctrine is a logical one
and has nothing to do with metaphysical theses of the Reality
or Unreality of anything whatever. He agrees with Hume that
only the proportions of mathematics and empirical science
have sense and that all other propositions are without sense.
This, of course, militates against his own propositions, whose
validity he nevertheless retains as ladders which one must
surmount to see the world rightly, using Wittgensteins defense
as his own.7 Even in rejecting metaphysics and truth, such
men
insist on a metaphysical and verifiable validity for their logic. It
is amazing how men can modestly dissolve God from their
philosophy and still retain their own integrity!
But this is no accident of philosophy. The essential issue is
between the authority of autonomous man and of the Sovereign
God. To allow God into the universe, provided that we open
the door, is to say that the universe is our universe, and that our
categories are decisive in human thinking. We can accept the
Scriptures as inerrant and infallible on our terms, as satisfactory
to our reason, but we have only established ourselves as god
and judge thereby and have given more assent to ourselves than
to God. But, if God be God, then the universe and man are His
creation, understandable only in terms of Himself, and no
meaning can be established except in terms of Gods given
meaning. To accept miracles or Scripture on any other ground is
in effect to deny their essential meaning and to give them a
pagan import.
Thus, the consistent Christian position must be this: no God,
no knowledge. Since the universe is a created universe, no true
knowledge of it is possible except in terms of thinking Gods
thoughts after Him. This the natural man, being inconsistent
with himself, does to a measure, using the ladder but denying
its existence. In his practical reasoning and research he is
semi-Christian. In his theoretical reason, he is insistently the
autonomous man. The issue, therefore, is between reason as
reason and reason as God. Mans rationality, according to the
Christian view, is part of mans relation to God, not a god in
itself. But autonomous man, with his laws of contradiction and
logic, demands that God must follow his rationality and his laws
of logic. In other words, God must think mans thoughts after
him! This is the plain import of much ostensibly Christian
philosophy. And against all this Van Til has raised an
effective standard.
NOTES
i. Christianity and Crisis Theology, pamphlet reprint from Cheng Yen Pao.
s. The Defense of the Faith, p. 49.
3. Alfred North Whitehead. Space, Time, Relativity, in The Aims of Educa-
tion and Other Essays, p. 166 (Macmillan, New York).
4. C. Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1949, p. 25.
5. Ibid., p. 21.
6. Ibid., p. 22.
7. Morton White, ed. The Age of Analysis, 1955, pp. 216, 220, 224 (New
American Library, Mentor).
3.
The Emperor Has No Clothes!
According to an old tale, certain clever philosophers

approached an emperor, offering to weave for him a rare and
costly garment which would have the marvellous capacity of
making known to him the fools and knaves in his realm. Because
of the magical quality of the threads, the garment would be
invisible to all but the wise and the pure in heart. Delighted, the
emperor commissioned the weaving of the royal robes at great
cost, only to find, to his dismay, that he obviously was a fool
and knave for he saw nothing on the looms. On the day set for
the grand parade, the knavish philosophers collected their royal
fee, dressed the emperor in his pot-bellied nakedness, and
skipped out of town as the parade began. The whole populace
joined the courtiers in praising the kings garments, none
daring to admit that they saw nothing but the emperors nudity,
lest they be branded as self-admitted fools and knaves. The
entire parade of folly collapsed, as the shame of king and people
was exposed by a childs honest remark, The emperor has no
clothes!
This story has often been retold, with no small homilies on
the feelings of king and people. But, significantly, the boy has
been neglected, as truth usually is. Consider the future of that
boy: with one small truth he exposed a national and personal
lie. With a grain of truth, he turned a peoples glory into shame.
It is no wonder nothing is said of him. The knavish philosophers
got off scot free, and rich as well. Emperor and people went on
with their everyday activities, eating, drinking, marrying and
giving in marriage. But the small boy was to old age an outcast:
he had told the truth and shamed his race. Not only the kings
19
nakedness, but that of his people, even of his father and
mother, had been exposed to the public gaze by his truth.
None were consciously naked until his truth destroyed
their lie, ripping away their fig-leaf of common hypocrisy.
The boy went on speaking the truth. Everyone knew him,
but few dared hear him, since few desired to be naked
again.
Now this story has a modern parallel in the life and
work of the philosopher of religion, Cornelius Van Til,
who, like the boy of old, looked at the reigning philosophy
and declared, The emperor has no clothes! Of perhaps
no other contemporary thinker can it be said that he is both
as well known and as little read as Van Til. The reaction
of reviewers and readers to the publication of his New
Modernism, An Appraisal of the Theology of Barth and
Brunner, in 1946, was an occasion of outraged shock and
horror, one of such dimensions as to make significant
reading from this short distance. The book was an
unspeakable offense, an outrage, a desecration of all
philosophy and theology. The ostensibly orthodox Calvin
Forum, a few years later, in discussing Van Tils
philosophy, did so with such intemperate heat and
language that its death was precipitated. Here, apparently,
was an Ishmael, whose hand was raised against every man.
Or was it not the reverse, with every mans hand raised
against Van Til?
Why the reason for all this passion? What is it in his
thinking that militates all contemporary theologies and
philosophies against him?
To understand this, we must first of all look again at
the Bible itself, rather than to the Graf-Wellhausen
recension of it. According to that document, the
temptation of man was to be as God, knowing good and
evil (Gen. 3:5 RV), that is, man was to be his own god,
determining what constitutes good and evil according to
the dictates of his own nature. To this temptation, man
submitted, and in terms of this concept man lives. Here,
then, is the origin of the concept of autonomous man,
who is the point of departure in philosophy, whose
thinking is creative, and whose reason has the right of
judicial review over
all of creation and its Creator. Here too is the point of origin
of most theology and philosophy, in man the knower, the
determiner of categories of thought, who tolerates God only if
all notions of antecedent being are first of all dispensed with.
This autonomous man will tolerate God only if direct revelation
is eliminated, if the simple identification of Scripture with the
Word of God is dropped, and Gods relation to man made
paradoxical or dialectical. Thus, it is not God who is known
directly, but mans own consciousness. It is not God who speaks
simply, but again mans own reason. God is either eliminated
from the scene, or allowed to co-exist with autonomous man on
mans own terms.
Let us return again to the naked emperor and his hypocritical
courtiers and populace. When the honest lads remark was made,
that emperor was exposed in all his bulgy and bloated
nakedness, and his worshipping followers revealed as fools and
knaves. Thus, everyones pride was hurt, and everyones shame
exposed. The animosity of all was directed therefore against
the lad. But a direct attack was impossible: it would be too
revelatory of their knavery. As a result, the court hangers-on
insisted that they agreed with the lads emphasis on truth but
rejected his methodology. We are as much concerned with
seeing the nature of reality as this young man, they insisted,
but we cannot tolerate this radical and disgraceful
methodology. Much more would have been accomplished, if
instead of saying, The emperor has no clothes, he had said,
The emperor has no overcoat, and had even offered to provide
him one. This would have established common ground between
them instead of destroying it. The boy, it was agreed, was an
extremist who had destroyed his case and eliminated any
standing ground by making it clear that the emperor had in fact
forsaken clothing instead of politely remarking that the
emperor had some clothes.
This has been the charge levelled also against Van Til. His
philosophy leaves nothing to the consistent natural man. The
religious hangers-on of autonomous man and his philosophy are
insistent that their emperor be allowed all but his overcoat, that
natural man be allowed valid knowledge of everything
except God and matters pertaining to revelation.
Fundamental to this assumption is the belief in an area of
neutral facts which are equally available to God and man
and derive their meaning from themselves. This belief,
destructive of all thinking, remains common to most
religious philosophy, although it has been attacked from
various sources of late, with differing emphases. Alan
Richardson, for example, has written that the illusion of
objective or uninterpreted history is finally swept away.
The facts of history cannot be disentangled from the
principles of interpretation by which alone they can be
presented to us as history, that is, as a coherent and
connected series or order of events. Christian faith supplies
the necessary principle of interpretation by which the facts
of the biblical and Christian history can be rationally seen
and understood.1 Facts and interpretation are inseparable.
The neo-orthodox and existentialist answer to this problem
is to eliminate the old subjective-objective relationship,
and its static conception of objective being and to replace
it with the divine-human encounter, with the
transcendental philosophy of pure act. Neither facts nor
God have any meaning in themselves but only in terms of
this interaction: mans experience of this encounter is the
final point of reference in all interpretation. But, according
to Van Til, in the Christian view of things it is the
self-contained God who is the final point of reference ...
For the Christian, facts are what they are, in the last
analysis, by virtue of the place they take in the plan of God.2
The natural man, the subject of the naked emperor, has a
very definite bias in his thinking but is insistent that the
young man alone is biased. Van Til is emphatic on the
fallacy of all attempts to establish a principle of
interpretation other than God. If, after the fashion of
Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Butler, we establish a neutral
principle of coherence or rationality, or like Clark and
Carnell, enthrone the law of contradiction, two major
concessions are involved. First, we reason from mans
principle to God and enthrone our law over God as basic to
all human and divine process. If the law or principle is the
basic tool for under-
By What Standard?
2
3
standing, then it and not God is basic to thinking, to
interpretation. But if God is the Creator, then God
Himself is the only true principle of interpretation.
Second, this approach allows that the natural man has the
plenary ability to interpret certain facts correctly even
though he wears the colored spectacles of the
covenant-breaker. As though convenant-breakers had no
axe to grind. As though they were not anxious to keep from
seeing the facts for what they really are.3 Increasingly, the
history of philosophy is making it obvious that all
philosophy now has either a reference point in man as
ultimate, or in God as ultimate. It is apparent also that if
the Scripture is right in asserting that the heavens declare
the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his
handywork (Ps. 19:1), then every fact in creation
witnesses to man concerning God. Man thus is not in a
world with a neutral witness nor is he himself a neutral
observer. If he fails to acknowledge this witness of creation
it is because he deliberately suppresses that witness. And
since he himself is a created being, he suppresses also the
witness of his own nature and arrogates to himself an
independent principle of interpretation, one in which he
becomes his own god. Instead of recognizing that he is
created, man assumes that he is ultimate; as such, he
refuses to tolerate an independent and ultimate being such
as God: God can at best exist only as another god among
gods, with a senior status perhaps, but an unquestionably
emeritus rank.
But if God has truly and causally created all things, is
self-contained and sovereign and by his providence
governs and controls all things, then no fact is a fact apart
from God nor has a full and valid interpretation apart from
Him. Every fact is a God-created and God-interpreted fact,
and this world exists only as a God-created and
God-interpreted world. While mans knowledge of the
world, and of Scripture, cannot be exhaustive, yet it can be
true to the measure that it recognizes and interprets what
has been fully interpreted by God. In principle, therefore,
autonomous man is incapable of any true knowledge if he
be faithful to himself as the sole principle of
interpretation, but because
man is not a finished product,4 he does not manifest this
total collapse in this life. This radical incapacity of the
consistent natural man is in every realm of knowledge and
every aspect of reality. His failure is not limited to the
field of religion but is equally applicable to natural science.
If all facts are God-given facts, then all facts have a
common source of interpretation, and to reject it in one
area is to reject it in all. Man is rescued from this
extremity only by his failure to be consistent to himself; he
thinks theistically where he can safely do so, while
rejecting the ground of his knowledge. Autonomous man is
thus like some Western families, whose sole means of
subsistence is in swinging a wide rope. Such men
emphatically deny that they rustle cattle, although they
have no other visible means of support, while at the same
time living entirely on the ranchers stock. Thus natural
man does have knowledge, but it is borrowed knowledge,
stolen from the Christian-theistic pasture or range, yet
natural man has no knowledge, because in terms of his
principle the ultimacy of his thinking, he can have none,
and the knowledge he possesses is not truly his own. If the
rustler were faithful to his profession of honesty, he would
either starve from lack of food or be compelled to honesty.
If the natural man were faithful to his own presuppositions,
he would either admit that he has no knowledge
whatsoever and can know nothing, or he would turn to the
ontological trinity as the sole source of knowledge and
only true principle of interpretation. The natural man has
valid knowledge only as a thief possesses goods.
For Van Til to say of autonomous man that the emperor
has no clothes is thus offensive; his critics would insist
that he merely say, The emperor has no overcoat. In
other words, in abandoning the self-contained God,
autonomous man has merely discarded a heavy overcoat but
is still fully clothed, and, in terms of summer weather,
properly dressed. But Van Til is insistent that autonomous
man in discarding God has discarded everything, and, if
consistent to his principle, has no valid knowledge of
anything, including himself, for he also is a God-created
and hence God-interpreted fact. The emperor and his
followers be-
By What Standard?
2
5
came involved in their disgraceful predicament precisely
because they refused to know themselves. By virtue of the
fall, men are sinners before God, a fact they are unwilling to
acknowledge. The knavish philosopher-weavers exploited
this wilful blindness on the part of the emperor and
people and hence led them to rob themselves and to parade
into shame. And this is Van Tils challenge to them, to face
the fact that they are nothing more than sinning creatures
living in a God-created world explicable only on Gods
terms and his interpretation. The champions of
autonomous man accuse Van Til of using a faulty
methodology to establish a truth they ostensibly welcome
with him, when in actuality the question of methodology is
an evasion of the basic truth, namely, the nakedness of
autonomous man and his refusal to acknowledge his
nakedness.
The emperor had no clothes but did not dare admit it.
As he paraded down the street, he felt the sun on his bare
back, and the light breeze on his naked shanks, and he
knew that he was fully exposed, whatever the sycophants
said concerning his magnificent robes. In like fashion the
natural man knows his nakedness. Adam and Eve, being
naive and still young in deceit, hid themselves, saying, I
was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. (Gen.
3:10). Their descendants, more hardened in revolt, are not
so honest. They parade openly, claiming to be dressed with
the very garment of God, with royal garb, emperors clothes.
They do so by a metaphysics of correlativity between God
and man, as Van Til has pointed out in his analysis of
Reinhold Niebuhr.5 They begin with an anti-metaphysical
bias; they cannot tolerate nor are interested in God in
Himself, in the ontological trinity. Man and God are alike
involved in history; God is not above and beyond it as the
sovereign Creator. To give God this sovereign status
reduces Christian faith to metaphysical truths instead of an
existential relationship in which the individual finds true
particularity and true universality in himself and becomes
his own principle of interpretation. Man and God are both
involved in the universe, which is the ultimate reality.
Mans original sin is not an ethical act but a metaphysical
fact created by the time-eternity, finite-infinite
antithesis and tension. Because the fall was not an
historical act in the field of ethics but is a
metaphysical fact concerning man, ethics disappears
into a dubious metaphysics, and personal
responsibility fades away to be replaced by an
involved universe whose development as a social
context is the basic reality. Thus history becomes the
primary concern, rather than God, or human
responsibility.
Mans role in this picture is more clearly stated by
Barth, concerning whom Van Til writes:
Feisser is no doubt formally correct when he says that
according to Barth we must start with Gods revelation
in Christ. God is for Barth identical with his revelation
to himself in Christ. The God and the man of Barth
become what they are because of their common relation
to Christ. They become what they are in Christ; they are
what they are because of a common Geschichte. Man
participates in the history of Christ. He exists to the
extent that he participates in this history. And this
history is the history of redemption. Man exists to the
extent that he participates in Christs redemptive work
for all and every man. Man exists to the extent that he is
the co-redemptor with Christ of mankind. 6
Not God in Himself, but God in his relationship is the
emphasis, and God is exhaustive in his relationship.
And man always participates in the life and history of
God, as well as in His being. As a result, the nakedness
of man is covered with garments stolen from God. But
the God whom man creates thus to clothe himself, is
not the God of Scripture, nor a God who has being in
Himself. He is only an existential relationship. As
Brunner has stated it in The Philosophy of Religion,
For our knowledge, the Absolute is no
morethough also no lessthan a necessary limiting
conception.7 God is not a self-existent God. But when
God ceases to be God, man also ceases to be man.
Without a self-existent God from whence we derive
meaning and the principle of interpretation, man finds
himself naked; his borrowed clothes are as
non-existent as his God of dialectics. His only reality
becomes a meaningless universe of brute factuality.
The one phil-
osopher who faced more or less frankly the nakedness of the
natural man was Nietzsche, who dispensed entirely with the
attempt to borrow from God. As a result, he faced nihilism.
Every attempt to give meaning became purely his own truth and
had no meaning apart from himself. Believing God dead, he
destroyed in turn every meaning he himself attempted to
establish, recognizing that no God means no meaning, not even
life. His insanity was the outcome of his philosophy; the
antithesis was between cosmic meaning and completely
personal meaning, between Christ, the principle of divine
interpretation, and Antichrist, the negation of meaning,
between Dionysius, the affirmation of self as meaning against all
meaning, and the Crucified, the interpreter and the Word. The
choice is clear cut; no God, no man; no God, no meaning. The
natural man is naked in himself, and his borrowed and stolen
garments cannot bear investigation. He has nothing in and of
himself.
He insists, however, that he is clothed, and that he himself
is the principle of interpretation, that nothing can be allowed
that is not in principle penetrable to the human mind . . . This
idea of the essential penetrability to the human mind of any
reality that we are to admit as having determinative significance
for our lives implies that we, as human beings, are to be our own
ultimate judges. This is the position of modern idealism, which,
like neo-orthodoxy, has a finite God, who, like man, faces brute
facts, the ultimately mysterious universe. Man and God are in
the same predicament; they alike struggle to understand and
deal with reality. God is only a principle of rationality within
the universe. But if the facts which face man are already
interpreted by God man need not and cannot face them as
brute facts. If the facts which man faces are really
God-interpreted facts, mans interpretation will have to be, in
the last analysis, a re-interpretation of God's interpretation.8
Contemporary philosophy follows the lead of Kant, who
ascribed ultimate definitory power to the mind of man.
Christianity, on the other hand, ascribes ultimate definitory
power to the mind of God. What Eddington ascribes to man, the
power of exhaustive dialec-
tification of significant reality, Christianity ascribes to
God.9 Van Tils purpose thus is to drive home the
basic issue and to make both Christian and
non-Christian aware of their presuppositions and to
make them epistemologically self-conscious, to make
them aware of how they know and what they know.
Men are either covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers,
either interpreting creation in terms of its meaning as
established by the Creator, or attempting a false
interpretation with filched odds and ends of material.
No valid epistemology or theory of knowledge can
begin elsewhere than with the ontological trinity, the
absolute person, the concrete universal, the source of
all meaning and interpretation. For Van Til,
apologetics has a central importance and a renewed
one, in that the non-Christian and inconsistently
Christian systems and philosophies are exposed and
corrected in terms of their nakedness. Thus Van Tils
writings constitute a devastating and running attack
on all contemporary systems in terms of his basic
philosophy.
For Van Til, philosophy and history, universals and
facts, are correlated in an important manner. Without
God, there is no factuality or meaning. Before the
facts can be approached, there must be the concrete
universal, the ontological trinity; in other words, only
theistic facts are possible. We definitely maintain that
for any fact to be a fact at all, it must be a theistic
fact.10 Van Tils approach is opposed to both the
deductive and inductive methods. The deductive
method begins with the ultimacy of certain axioms,
not with God. The inductive method assumes that any
kind of fact exists, rather than theistic facts. Van Tils
approach is neither inductive or deductive, apriori or
aposteriori, as these terms are historically understood,
because they contemplate mans activity in the
universe but do not figure with the significance of
God above the universe.11 It is the firm conviction
of every epistemologically self-conscious
Christian-theist that no human being can utter a single
syllable, whether in negation or in affirmation, unless
it were for Gods existence. Thus the transcendental
argument seeks to discover
what sort of foundations the house of human knowledge
must have, in order to be what it is.12
The charge levelled against the consistent Christian
philosopher is that he is guilty of circular reasoning, that
he reasons from God to God, or from Scripture to Scripture.
He ostensibly commits intellectual suicide because he says
that he believes the Bible because it is true, and believes
something to be true because it is in the Bible. According
to Van Til,
We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only
reasoning that is possible to finite man. The method of
implication as outlined above is circular reasoning. Or we may
call it spiral reasoning. We must go round and round a thing to
see more of its dimensions and to know more about it, in
general, unless we are larger than that which we are
investigating. Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason
about Him by any other way, than by a transcendental or
circular argument. The refusal to admit the necessity of
circular reasoning is itself an evident token of Antitheism.
Reasoning in a vicious circle is the only alternative to
reasoning in a circle.13
All reasoning is either from God to God-given and
God-interpreted facts, or from man to man-made
interpretations of brute factuality. All reasoning is
circular, but man refuses to admit to the circularity of his
reasoning because he assumes that an infinite and
exhaustive view of things is possible to himself, that he can,
in other words, reason like God rather than as man.
Van Tils analyses of the history of philosophy are
significant in their development of the epistemological
presuppositions of the various schools. Greek philosophy
he finds particularly important in that it represented the
development of the antitheistic mind without any
intermixture of Christian elements. Greek thinking lacked
any true theistic elements, and, despite many references to
God, believed basically in the self-contained and ultimate
character of nature. God and man, form and content, spirit
and matter, were essentially aspects of nature or
identifiable with nature. It was not only possible to study
the objective world without any reference to a God beyond
the universe but
possible to study God in the same manner also. Basically, man
defined God, not God man. The human mind was capable of
knowing any and all finite facts without any reference to God.
The universe was ultimate, and the mind in a sense ultimate as
part of that universe. Greek speculation assumed, first, that all
things are at bottom one. Second, the world of becoming is
ultimate, whereas for Christian thought Being is before
becoming and independent of becoming. Third, for Greek
thought not only is change taken for granted as ultimate, but
the many generated from the one is always identical with the
one. Greek thought, moreover, assumed the possibility of
neutrality, whereas for Van Til the existence of an absolute
God, from whom every creature has derived existence and to
whom all are responsible, rules out all possibility of neutrality.
The Greek mind is the end result of Eves course.
Before Eve could listen to the tempter she had to take for granted
that the devil was perhaps a person who knew as much about reality
as God knew about it ... That is, Eve was obliged to postulate an
ultimate epistemological pluralism before she could even proceed to
consider the proposition made to her by the devil. Or, otherwise
expressed, Eve was compelled to assume the equal ultimacy of the
mind of God, the devil, and herself. And this surely excludes the
exclusive ultimacy of God. This therefore was a denial of Gods
absoluteness epistemologically. Thus neutrality was based upon
negation. Or we may as well say that neutrality is negation. . . . In
connection with this we may remark in passing that when Eve
listened to the tempter, she not only had to posit an original
epistemological pluralism, but also an original metaphysical
pluralism. She had to take for granted that a time created being could
reasonably consider herself to be sufficiently ultimate in her being,
as to warrant an action that was contrary to the will of an eternal
being. That is, she had to equalize time and eternity not only, but
she had to put time above eternity. It was in time that Satan told
her the issue was to be settled. He said that it still remained to be
seen whether Gods threats would come true. The experimental
method was to be employed. Only time could tell. Now this
attitude implied that God was no more
than a finite God. If He were thought of as absolute, it would be
worse than folly for a creature of time to try out the interpretation
of God in the test-tube of time. If He were thought of as eternal,
such an undertaking was doomed to failure, because in that case
history could be nothing but the expression of Gods will.15
Greek epistemology was Eves thinking hardened into certainty.
In Greek thinking, as in Platos, for example, time and eternity
are very nearly identified, though at first they seem to be
radically opposed to one another. Time is the moving image of
eternity; the temporal and eternal are alike aspects of one
general reality. Man is the temporal appearance of the eternal.
As such, mankind and not the Second Person of the Trinity,
Jesus Christ, is the mediator and interpreter. Time and eternity,
moreover, are intermixed in mankind, whereas in Christ the
two natures are without intermixture. For Platonism philosophy
ends in final mystery, whereas in Christianity the absolutely
self-conscious God knows no mystery.
Platos final mystery comes close to destroying all knowledge.
Plato tried unsuccessfully with Heraclitus to find a basis for
knowledge in the sense world alone. He tried unsuccessfully
with Parmenides to find knowledge in the Ideal world alone.
Because for Greek thought reality was at bottom one, and the
entire universe ultimate, differentiation became virtually
impossible. The Idea of the Good seemed to give a
fundamental and underlying unity to knowledge, but since all
other Ideas, including Ideas of mud, hair, filth, Ideas of evil,
were equally ultimate and unchangeable, it posed a problem. A
fundamental unity was assumed, but a fundamental diversity
appeared. And if evil is as ultimate as good, there is then no
underlying and controlling unity in the world of Ideas. Thus,
no victory for any Idea was possible, and the only answer could
be the compromise of all Ideas and the smoothing away of the
significance of each. Moreover, it was not certain how these
Ideas could even be known. How could the whole of any Idea
be known in any sense object?
But if the Idea of the Good were thus cut up it could no longer
furnish the unity that was indispensable for knowledge. In other
words the doctrine of Idea left the pr oblem of the one and the
many and therefore that of creation unsolved. If the Ideal world
was itself an ultimate plurality it could be of no service in an
attempt to explain the plurality of the world we live in.16
The piece-meal apprehension of Ideas meant the end of
knowledge also in an infinite regression. Nor could Plato escape
this pr oblem b y making Ideas subjective, to be no more than
our own thoughts, in which cas e knowledge would be reduced to
illusion. Moreover, reality would then escape us, since most of
reality would lie beyond the scope of mans knowledge and
perception. Greek thought, as Van T il points out, was incapable
of accounting for the fact of knowledge, and, by its philosoph y
tended to dissolve all knowledge into a common and
meaningless reality. It could give no account of the world of
experience but only tended to destroy it. The epistemology of
Eve and her Greek sons, beginning with the equal ultimacy of
God, the devil and man, ends with the equal irrelevancy and
meaninglessness of all things. Every approach of Plato ended in
failure. When he approached the problem of knowledge with an
exclusively empirical, then with an exclusively m etempirical,
and finally with a union of the two methods, he failed to solve
the dilemma. The three fundamental ass umptions of Greek
philosophy could not be overcome. First, all things remain at
bottom one. Second, the many come out of the one, that is, the
fact of change. T hird, despite this becoming, all things remain at
bottom one and differentiation becomes a problem. Thus, God,
man and the devil were ultimately the same. The human and
divine m ind differ quantitatively r ather than substantially.
In Augus tine, the fir s t princip les of Greek thought were
clearly and definitely rejected, according to Van T il, who
regards Augustine as a Christian-theistic philosopher with
certain elements of Platonism in his thinkng but basically sound
in the direction of his thought. For Augustine, the physical
universe existed only as a creation of God. In his final outlook,
Augustine
never separated his self-existence from Gods existence. The
universe is never the presupposition or basic reality for him; it
is a creation of the absolute God. Accordingly, Augustine did
not attempt to interpret reality in terms of Ideas but in terms of
the ontological trinity, which Furnished the basis of the
principles of unity and diversity in human knowledge. Without
the trinity, knowledge is impossible; here is plurality in unity,
and the only means of escaping the dilemma of human
knowledge, which resolves itself, on anti-theistic grounds, into
either an ultimate plurality without unity or the possibility of
knowledge, or an ultimate unity, without dffferentiation or
meaning. In the triune God is the solution to this problem. But,
because human knowledge is analogical rather than original or
creative, it must always depend on divine knowledge.
Anything that a human being knows must first have been known to
God. Anything a human being knows he knows only if he knows and
because he knows God. For that reason too, man can never know
anything as well and as exhaustively as God knows it. The fact that
mans knowledge must always remain analogical is applicable to his
knowledge of God as well as to his knowledge of the universe. God
will never be understood in His essence by man. If He were He
would no longer be God. In that case there would be no solution
for the problem of knowledge.17
This concept or doctrine of the trinity is the heart of Augustines
final epistemology and his radical disagreement with Greek
thought. Plato, in assuming the ultimacy of the universe, could
not escape the plurality of the world of the senses, because time
and eternity were equally ultimate, and the Ideas and the senses
likewise. Moreover, for Augustine, because true knowledge is
analogical and involves thinking Gods thoughts after Him, no
one can have true intellectual knowledge of God unless he first
has faith and accordingly is morally in tune with God. And
since for Augustine the principle of evil was finite and that of
good infinite, the unity of Gods plan could not be broken and
the categories of eternity are determinative for human thought.
In Scholastic philosophy the Aristotelian form of Greek
thought triumphed finally over Augustinianism. The God of the
Scholastics resembled closely the indifferentiated reality of the
Greeks. This reality, analyzed into substance, structure and act,
was called Father, Son and Holy Ghost but bore scant
resemblance to the ontological trinity of Augustine and
Scripture. The Greek concept of the gradation of reality
prevailed increasingly, and, as a result, for Scholasticism,
salvation meant advancement on the scale of being. Evil (sin is
metaphysical, not primarily ethical, and is low on the scale of
being) is far away, removed from the center, thin in its
participation in reality or being. Atonement in terms of this
implied doing good, moralism, whereby one participated in the
good and rose on the scale of being.
Because of this pagan element in Scholasticism, universals
were a major problem. Universals and not the triune God
provided the foundation for Scholastic thought, and
nominalism was skepticism and despair as surely as the
subjectivism of Ideas spelled trouble for the Greeks. They had no
answer to the problem of the one and the many. Again there was
no escape from the dilemma of ultimately undifferentiated and
meaningless being as against an ultimate and unrelated
pluralism. Scholasticism dealt with this problem by
undercutting the Augustinian distinction between God and man
with a Greek concept of being. Scholasticism thus sought to
establish knowledge on a basis wherein no mystery existed for
man, while mystery remained for God, whereas for the theist
mystery exists for man but not for God. And, since history is
determined by God, and time by eternity, it is not destructive of
knowledge and meaning for mystery to exist for man. By
setting up his own mind as the standard of truth, man destroys
the possibility of truth. As Van Til has summarized it,
All the antinomies of human thought such as the relation of time
and eternity, the one and the many, unity and diversity are involved
in the problem of the universals. There are only two possible
attitudes that can be taken to these antinomies. One can say that it
is the business of the human mind to solve these antinomies and
that
unless it succeeds in doing so, there is no valid knowledge for man.
Or one can say that since man is finite, it is clearly not the business
of man to seek to solve these antinomies and that they must be
solved in God or mans thought would be meaningless altogether.
We may even go farther and say that antitheistic thought has
artificially created these antinomies. If a man would say to himself
that unless he can successfully climb the city hall he does not see
how he can walk the street, we try to point him to the fact that the
two accomplishments are not mutually dependent upon one another.
Thus also it may not be necessary for man to be able to solve these
antinomies of thought before he can have adequate knowledge for
his life. We hold then that the Scholastics made the same mistake
as the Greeks. They took for granted that words must be used either
simply univocally or simply equivocally. They took for granted that
every predicate used must apply to God in the same way that it
applies to man or there can be no meaning in any predication at
all.
Although the Scholastics made reference to God in relation
to the universals, nevertheless their solution was basically pagan.
Seemingly, Scholasticism made faith important, in that the truths
of revelation could be understood only by faith, and the natural
world and its truths by the reason of natural man. In actuality,
this was tantamount to a denial of the doctrine of creation, for
the world was given a meaning inherent in itself and separate
from God and hence discoverable by man apart from God and
without reference to the fact of creation. Thus the universe was
in effect cut loose from God and faith given only the area of
mystery beyond the universe. But the Christian-theistic position
asserts that apart from God nothing can be truly understood
because all things are created by God and derive their meaning
only from His sovereign will and creative purpose. It is not
surprising, as Van Til has pointed out, that Roman Catholic
thinking has been weak at this point in its doctrine of creation,
and that such men as F. J. Sheen, in God and Intelligence are
indifferent to the question of the eternity of the world and of
matter.19 Christian-theistic thinking is insistent upon the
complete self-consciousness of God and the consequent
analogical
reasoning on the part of man 20 and makes the Bible central in
its thinking. The fact of sin and mans rebellion against G od
and His interpretation of reality are basic to Christian
epistemology, as is the fact of creation. Scholasticism, in believing
that man can have true knowledge apart from God, forsakes the
Christian-theistic view.
Lutheranism failed to make a full break with Rom e, in that
Luther attacked, not squarely the paganism present there, but
the legalism that was its fr uit. Luther tended to limit the image
of God in man to the moral attributes of knowledge,
righteousness and holiness. T he Scholastic concept of the image
was a donum superadditum to an already existing sense-world.
Luther failed to stress sufficiently mans intellect and will in his
view of the image. T his broader conception of the image, as
found in Calvin, means that all mans relationships as a
self-conscious being are mediated to him through the image of
God and hence are presented to him not only in terms of their
created meaning, i.e., of God, but apprehended by him in terms
of a created image which reflected the personality of God. To
limit the scope of the image of God in man is to introduce
impersonalis m to the extent that we limit that image. As a result,
Luthers early teaching on predestination, seemingly s imilar to
Calvins, differs from it by virtue of his impersonalism, which
leads him to the fringes of philosophical determinism and a
mechanical relationship between God and man. In like fashion,
the means of grace, the Word and the sacraments, tend to work
impersonally and to an extent mechanically, whereas no
impersonalism between God and man can exist in a
Christian-theistic epistemology. This led to the s ynergis m of
Melanchthon.
Synergism takes for granted that there can be no truly personal
relastion between God and man unless the absoluteness of God be
denied in proportion that the freedom of man is maintained.
Synergism assumed that an act of man cannot be truly personal
unless such an act be unpersonal. By that we mean that according to
synergism, a personal act of man cannot at the same time but in a
different sense, be a personal act of God. Synergism assumes that
either man
or God acts personally at a certain time, and at a certain place, but
that they cannot act personally simultaneously at the same point of
contact. In other words, synergism holds that personal activity on
the part of man must always be at the expense of the personal
character of that which surrounds him. Now this might seem to be
an innocent matter as far as the universe around us is concerned.
Yet the danger is very great since the depersonalisation involved
does not limit itself to the material universe. It extends itself logically
to God. And even if it does not at once and clearly oppose the
personal activity of God, it remains a fact that there is always a
tendency in synergism to hold on to some of the remnants of the
Greek idea of a universe in some sense of the term, independent of
God. If nowhere else the synergist at least extracts his own activity
from the personal activity of God at some point of time. And just
to that extent he has depersonalized God. . . . The significance of
Luthers conception of the image of God now begins to appear.
The epistemological effect of it was that mans knowledge is once
more made to depend in some measure upon something other than
the personality and self-consciousness of God. There are elements of
Platonic Rationalism in Lutheranism. The spectre of an
independent sense world looms upon the horizon once more.
Lutheranism has not learned to interpret all reality in exclusively
eternal categories. Man is given originality at the expense of God.21
According to Van Til, evidence of this weakness in Lutheranism
is further seen in the Lutheran conception of the Person of
Christ. The two natures of Christ are seen as blending entirely,
and both natures as present in the elements of the Lords supper.
According to Krauth, To say that the nature of Christ is
personally present without his humanity is to deny that his
humanity is part of his personality and the doctrine of the
incarnation, falls to the dust.22 The orthodox formula of
Chalcedon is thus virtually rejected, as is its declaration,
directed against the Eutychian heresy of a single nature, which
asserted the two natures without confusion, without
conversion or change. The Lutheran position leads to the
assertion that the human can become the divine, that the
eternal and the temporal can intermingle, that the two can have
an independent or co-equal
existence, that the eternal can be temporalized, and that the
eternal is not determinative of the temporal. Scholasticism saw
the weakness of man, not in his sin but in his finitude, not in
ethics but in metaphysics, and Lutheranism at times tends to this
same position. The Christian-theistic view is that unity and
diversity, the one and the many, exist in equal ultimacy in the
ontological trinity. The antitheistic view denies this and seeks
the ultimacy of the one and many in the universe. When
Scholasticism thus debated the question of universals, it had
virtually abandoned the theistic view and sought its answer
within the frame-work of the universe. Lutheranism, in seeking
to some extent its principle of unity in an intermingling of the
eternal and temporal, set forth in dramatic fashion in its concept
of the Lords supper, is refusing to accept the determinative
character of the eternal and insisting that mans freedom is
endangered if the temporal is not fused into the eternal. Such a
view tends to deny reality to anything in eternity which does
not at the same time exist in time, whereas the consistently
theistic view holds that the only solution to time lies in eternity.
The natural outcome of this intermingling is an insistence on
the independence of man, because time is determinative of
both the temporal and the eternal. The incarnate Christ
becomes determinative of not only the Second Person of the
Godhead but the trinity as a whole, because he works in time
and the trinity in eternity. God must therefore limit Himself out
of respect for His creatures; He cannot infringe on their
independence, because time is the arena of ultimate reality, not
eternity. Accordingly, the sinner determines his own salvation;
Gods grace starts or assists him to that end; it cannot
determine him without destroying the meaning of time and its
centrality. To grant the sinner this capability has far-reaching
implications, as Van Til discerningly points out:
If one maintains that he can approach Christ of his own accord even
though he is a sinner, he may as well say that he can approach the
Father too. And if one can say that he knows what the fact of sin
means without the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit, he may as
well say that he can know other facts without reference to God. In
fact he may as well say that he can know any and every fact without
reference to God. If one fact can be known without reference to God
there is no good reason to hold that not all facts can be known
without reference to God. When the elephant of naturalism once
has his nose in the door, he will not be satisfied till he is altogether
23
in.
Thus Lutheranism veers from an impersonal and mechanical
determinism to an insistence on the independence of man. In
neither extreme is the personal God fully determinative of time;
the determination lies within the universe or within man.
Despite its great beginnings, Lutheranism has been unwilling to
follow the Reformation faith to its philosophical conclusions.
In Arminianism, as Van Til analyzes it, the unwillingness to
face the full implications of original sin carried Protestantism
further along on the road of concessions. In Watson, sin is
ascribed to finitude rather than to moral revolt against God. Evil
and finitude of necessity go together in this view, and man needs
a savior not because of a moral condition but because he is a
human being. In other words the implication is that man needs
to be delivered not so much from sin as from creaturehood, from
his finitude into infinitude. Moreover, from the Arminian point
of view, mans rationality and freedom involve and include his
ability to change the history God has planned, or to do things
God has not planned. In short, mans life is outside the plan of
God, constitutes a fact beyond Gods control, one to which God
can offer assistance but cannot govern. We are here on the road
to the modern philosophic point of view which sees the
space-time continuum as the matrix of all reality. God exists, and
is in the picture, but increasingly as a spectator; on the
sidelines, ready to cheer man on but unable to determine the
course and outcome of the race. Arminianism allows God and
Christ onto the scene only to start the race, remove certain
obstacles, and to award a prize. The final determination of events
belongs to man. Arminianism further holds that, to be truly
ethical, the will of man must be exclusively responsible for
what is done. But the
measure of self-determination demanded for man is an
impossibility, and a significant impossibility, in that such
self-determination is possible for God alone. Since man is a
creature, living in a created world, in time governed by God, his
act cannot suddenly break context with its entire world. The act
of a creature, in a created world and in created time, can be only
a created act. It is not only a personal act and a responsible act,
but also a created act. Thus, in its concept of the ethical act,
Arminianism claims for man what is possible only with God and
thereby robs God to honor man. Moreover, God is further
robbed by making evil virtually mean finiteness. If evil is
finiteness, and finitude is the inherent condition of man, then
the Greek dilemma is again with us, namely, that evil is as
ultimate as the good, that evil is a part of the ultimate reality.
Primacy is given to the temporal realm, which is the
determinative one in this view, and evil is made basic to the
temporal realm because finitude is inherent in it. The moral evil
of Christian thought is eliminated; man is too independent for a
concept of transmitted original sin to be credible. Theology thus
gives way to an anthropology and God to man, eternity to time.
In Calvinism the Greek element was eliminated from
Christian theistic thought and a consistent epistemology
formulated. The false independence of man was shown for what
it is, and the noetic influence of sin fully recognized. Scripture
was made central to thinking, and the work of the Holy Spirit
in the restoration of man to the true knowledge of God
emphasized. Calvins conception distinguished between the
narrower and wider sense or understanding of the image. In
the narrower sense, it applies to the true knowledge, true
righteousness, and true holiness which man possessed when
created by God. The fall destroyed this image, whereas the
image in its broader sense, mans rationality and morality, his
intellectual and emotional life, remain still in Gods image, but
with limitations. Man retains these aspects of his nature, but in
a blinded sense. He is rational, but his rationality is spiritually
blind, emotionally distorted, and out of kilter in terms of its
created purpose, i.e.,
to function analogically, to think Gods thoughts after Him and
to interpret and experience life in terms of the will of God.
Man, while spiritually blind, is still a person, and therefore the
synergism of Luther is no necessity for Calvin. Synergism faced
an either-or situation; either God acted, or man acted; it did not
dare face the ultimate question, either God is a person or man
is a person. For Calvin, man is a personality because God is a
person. The sinner, a created person, cannot know God aright
unless new light is given him by the Scripture, and the power of
sight restored by the Holy Spirit working in his heart. Salvation
is not the eternalization of man but rather his restoration to his
original perfection and a development thereof. The incarnation
is therefore not made necessary by mans finitude but by his sin.
Since mans finitude is not the problem, Christs human nature in
the Lutheran sense is not needed in the sacrament. The eternal
order is the determinative one, and God saves man in time, not
because of time. God saves man through the incarnation, by
means of the appearance of the Second Person of the trinity in
history and his incarnation, whereby human nature was united
without intermingling with the divine nature. The incarnation
was the means of salvation, but the cause of salvation was to be
found only in the fore-ordained and predestined eternal counsel
of God, only in the ontological trinity. To emphasize the
incarnation, and especially the human nature of Christ, as
against the ontological trinity, is to insist on mixing the
temporal and eternal and shifting the area of reality away from
the eternal and from God. As Van Til has stated it, it is upon
the development of these teachings of Calvin that we must
depend for a consistent Christian epistemology. Calvin did not
mix the categories of the temporal and eternal. He did not
succumb to the temptation of giving man a false independence
in the work of salvation. Hence he alone of all the Reformers
could rid himself of the last remnants of Platonic reasoning.24
Two significant aspects of Calvins theology point up the
nature of his Christian theistic thinking; these are his doctrine
of covenant theology and the trinity. In Calvinism, there is no
subordinationism in the doctrine of the trinity. The persons of
the trinity are representationally exhaustive of one another and
represent the solution, on the eternal level, of the one and many
principle. Because the persons of the trinity have an equal
ultimacy, the principles of unity and diversity have an equal
ultimacy. As Van Til analyzes it,
This mutual exhaustion of the persons of the trinity places one
before the choice of interpreting reality in exclusively temporal
categories or in exclusively eternal categories. The demand of the
doctrine of the trinity when thus conceived is that reality be
interpreted in exclusively eternal categories inasmuch as the
source of diversity lies in the trinity itself and could never be
found in a sense world beyond God. Hence the problem of the one
and the many, of the universal and the particular, of being and
becoming, of analytical and synthetic reasoning, of the apriori and
the aposteriori must be solved by an exclusive reference to the
trinity. The only alternative to this is to assume responsibility for
trying to explain the whole of reality in temporal terms. Thus man
is placed before a clear alternative and there is no longer a
temptation to attempt a solution of these problems by seeking
intermixtures of the temporal and the eternal.25
On this concept of the trinity, Calvin established his covenant
theology. Since the persons of the trinity are representationally
exhaustive of one another, it follows that human thinking is
representational also. Since God is the creator and determiner
of all things, and since all persons, things and acts are created
facts, truly understandable only in terms of the ontological
trinity, it follows therefore that in every fact and in any fact,
man is face to face with God. Nothing exists in a neutral or
impersonal world; all things exist in a created world in which
every fact is surrounded by the personality of God.
Even the meeting of one finite personality with another finite
personality would not be truly personal if there were an impersonal
atmosphere surrounding either or both of these personalities. What
makes their meeting completely personal is the fact the personality
of each and of both is surrounded by the personality of God. Hence
all personal relationship between finite persons must be mediated
through the central personality of God. Every act of a finite person
must in the nature of the case be representational because the only
alternative to this is that it should be completely impersonal. We
may even say that every act of the infinite personality of God must
be representational because the only alternative to it would be that
it would be impersonal. The trinity exists necessarily in the manner
that it does. We have seen this to be so because the principles of
unity and diversity must be equally original. Accordingly, when we
come to the question of the nature of finite personality it is not a
handicap to finite personality to think of itself as related in some
way to the personality of God, but that it is the very condition of
its existence. A finite personality could function in none other than
a completely personalistic atmosphere, and such an atmosphere can
be supplied by him only if his existence depends entirely upon the
exhaustive personality of God. It is in this manner that Calvin
conceives of the personality of man. Man is not a metaphysically
independent being. . . . Calvin is very sure that unless man were
operating within Gods plan, man would not be operating at all. It
is not with apologies that Calvin proposes his doctrine of the will
of man, but he sets it forth boldly as the only alternative to complete
impersonalism. Calvin was keenly conscious of the fact that the
covenant theology furnishes the only completely personalistic
interpretation of reality. The false striving of Lutheranism and
Arminianism for a personal act that should be unipersonal in the
sense of not being surrounded by a completely personalistic
atmosphere, Calvin is convinced, would lead, if carried out
consistently, to the rejection of the whole Christian-theistic scheme of
thought.26
For Calvin, mans true knowledge of himself and his knowledge
of God come simultaneously. Since all knowledge is derived
from analogical thinking on the basis of the revelation of God
in Scripture, and since all meaning is derived from God, true
self-knowledge comes only as God is known. Thus the traditional
proofs of God meant little to Calvin, in that they assumed that
on the basis of prior true knowledge, man advanced to the final
knowledge, of the existence of God. The arguments assume the
neutrality of the mind, whereas Calvin was convinced of the
enmity of the mind and man against God. Moreover, the proofs
of God first assumed the independence of the mind of man and
of natural facts from God and thereby conceded to the
opposition rather than advanced the theistic cause. Calvins
doctrine of God does justice to both transcendence and
immanence, while giving priority to transcendence. Gods nature
and will are never separated; His will is always expressive of
His nature, and, as a result, His activities are always completely
personal. His insistence on the aseity of the Son is basic to his
doctrine of the trinity: no subordinationism is tolerated. The
significance of this Van Til has emphasized:
If there is any subordinationism it implies that God is to that extent
no longer the sole interpretative category of all reality. The measure
of subordinationism that any system of theology retains in its
doctrine of the trinity is indicative of the measure of paganism in
such a theology. Platos independent sense world looms upon the
horizon the moment subordinationism is given any place.27
In the modern era, the question of epistemology has come to
the foreground in philosophy. Ostensibly, this is a by-passing of
metaphysics and an elimination of God from philosophy as
irrelevant. Actually, the full significance of the Christian theistic
position is most clearly seen in the extent to which modern
philosophy goes to eliminate an independent and sovereign
God. The issues are more sharply drawn therefore between the
consciousness of man and the consciousness of God as the frame
of reference.
In Descartes, the ground of all certainty is the human
consciousness in independence not only from the universe
around him but especially from God. For Calvin the personality
of man cannot be known nor can exist without the personality of
God. For Descartes, nothing can be known without mans
self-consciousness and personality in itself. The universe is a
mechanistic one, and God merely the creator of the machine,
now functioning in independence of Him. The machine has its
own laws and workings, and the inventor need not be
known in order to
understand the machine. The lives of the Wright brothers are
of great interest to any student of the history of aviation, but
utterly irrelevant to any understanding of the principles of flight
or to the piloting of aircraft today. The Wright brothers created
the first successful plane, but they did not create the principles
of flight which made that plane possible; they merely used them.
The God of Descartes is ultimately in the same position. More
than that, man rather than God is made the ultimate source of
universal laws and interpretation.
As a result of Descartes point of departure, two lines of
thought developed in philosophy, empiricism and rationalism.
Empiricism holds that the individual man is the standard of
truth and holds to the ultimacy of the sense world. The
universals are purely subjective. The climax of such thought
was the skepticism of Hume, for whom no knowledge was
possible. Rationalism sought to interpret reality in terms of
certain apriori principles. These apriori principles, however,
were not anchored in the ontological trinity or in eternity but in
the human mind as ultimate. In Spinoza and Leibniz
rationalism reached its climax. For Spinoza, God, man and the
universe are but individuations and aspects of the general Idea
of substance. But, as Van Til has pointed out, to say that all is
God is no different than saying nothing is God. Univocal
reasoning must always lead to negation. Univocal reasoning is
based upon negation. The very presupposition of univocal
reasoning is that there is no absolute God. If there were an
absolute God it is ipso facto out of the question to apply the
categories of thought to Him in the same way that they are
applied to man.28 Leibniz sought individuation on the basis of
complete description and by reduction to mathematical
formulae. Revelation was thus an impossibility. The interpreter
is the mind of man, not the mind of God, and the mind of man
can wholly comprehend all reality. The equal ultimacy of the
one and many is sought without success in the universe, and the
old theory of the gradation of being espoused. None of these
devices enabled Leibniz to escape the dilemma of Spinoza or to
rescue religion as he sought to do; having begun
with the ultimacy of the universe, he could do no more than
attempt to analyze it into both God and man. As Leibniz sought
to be wholly univocal, so Hume sought to be wholly
equivocal in his reasoning. As in the philosophy of Leibniz God
lost his individuality in order to become wholly known, so in
the philosophy of Hume God maintained his individuality but
remained wholly unknown.29
Kants solution to the question is a fusion of rationalism and
empiricism. All rational and empirical data had disappeared and
the human consciousness faced an undifferentiated reality
dissolved either into unrelated sensations or faced as
mysterious bulk. Kants answer was not new: his radicalism
was. Kant sought to save the objects, God and the world, by
destroying the traditional conception of the subject-object
relation and making autonomous man a macrocosm containing
both God and the world. Because man was the interpreter,
subjectivity, the old ghost haunting philosophy, was ostensibly
banished. Even as for Christian thought, the self-consciousness
of the sovereign God has no problem of subjectivity, in that it
comprehends all things, having created and sustaining them, so
in Kant subjectivity disappears only if it be granted that
autonomous man replaces the ontological trinity and that in
him being is exhausted in relation and that relation is
exclusively internal. Philosophy previously had tended to fall
into Kants solution, but had regarded it as defeat; Kant
accepted it as the means to victory.
To understand Kants work, which was concerned with the
problem of knowledge, it is necessary to see what he was
contending against. Kant was concerned over the collapse of
epistemology, over the reduction of knowledge to illusion in
contemporary philosophy. He was thus attacking and
superseding both empiricism and rationalism, empiricism for its
acceptance of the validity of sensations as the source of all
knowledge, and rationalism for its acceptance of innate ideas as
needing no matter outside themselves. The unhappy outcome of
both schools was a wretched dualism between mind and matter,
between the
knower and brute factuality, the physical universe, with no
means of bridging the gap or establishing the validity of either
sensations or reason. Kants concern was epistemology, not
metaphysics, not what is real, but what can we know. Kant
eliminated from consideration the old approach as dogmatic,
since it merely involved an attempt to trace ideas to their sources,
either innate ideas or sensations, in both instances the self
having an essentially negative role. For Kant the true approach
is the transcendental or critical, the study of pure reason itself.
Kant was concerned with establishing in reason that which had
a universality beyond human experience while yet necessary to
it, reliable and applicable to the world of things. This method is
transcendental because it is necessary to all experience, not
because it transcends it. The transcendental is rationally prior
and hence indispensable to knowledge, and the critical method is
the finding of this indispensable condition. As a result, for the
old dualism of mind and matter, Kant substituted a threefold
world of subjective states, phenomena, and things-in-themselves.
The subjective area is no longer the domain of knowledge,
but neither is the realm of things-in-themselves. Here is Kants
sharp break with the past. Things-in-themselves lie beyond us
and so beyond all knowledge, unknown and unknowable. We
cannot say what these things-in-themselves are, but we can say
that they exist, because they are a necessary postulate to
experience. These are Noumena, basic to the knowing process
and therefore postulated, but beyond that their reality is neither
to be affirmed or denied; such a judgment is not possible. The
basic realm is that of human knowledge, the world of
phenomena or experience. Phenomena are not
things-in-themselves but things-for-us, reality as humanity
experiences it and as it is interrelated. Thus the attempt to
correlate mind and matter, the knower and reality, is dropped
entirely; it is not the correlation which constitutes knowledge
but the experience, the synthetic power of the mind, the unifying
of human experience. Sensations give only raw material;
synthesis produces knowledge. It is not the result of
combining experiences that is knowledge as much as the act of
combining them. Thus knowledge is constitutive, creative,
interpretive, and the common ability of all humanity. While
another order of beings might have a different power of
synthesis and thus live in a radically different world than ours,
yet the validity of knowledge is not thereby denied, because
absolute reality is not the object of knowledge. Practically
speaking, humanity can say, according to Kant, The world is
my representation. Such a suggestion hints of the pluralism
which William James was subsequently to develop. Yet Kant
also assumed, to explain this capacity for synthesis and creative
thinking, a transcendental ego which is the postulate of all
knowledge. It is the universal Self, not an object of knowledge
but the virtual source of knowledge. The Self therefore is the
basic reality and hence not an object of knowledge. The
universe and God are not objects of knowledge either, but for a
different reason, in that they are regulative principles and ideas
and limiting concepts, basic to knowledge as such, and whose
existence in themselves is not a question for knowledge and
hence neither to be affirmed or denied. Their status is as
adjuncts of the transcendental ego.
Thus, while Kant attacked empiricism and rationalism, his
basic attack was on the concept of the ontological trinity, the
self-contained God. Empiricism and rationalism had collapsed
in their attempt to sever knowledge from dependence on God,
and hence Kants hostility to them, because for Kants thinking
the severance was both basic and necessary. Ultimate reality is
declared to be unknowable; we are surrounded by brute
factuality of which we are the creative interpreters. Instead of
trying to establish knowledge by relating mind and matter,
Kant finds it in the world of experience, in the world of
phenomena, in synthetic reason. While reality may or may not
exist beyond man, it most certainly exists in man. The true self,
the transcendental ego is at least part (and possibly all) of that
basic reality and thus by nature is the valid interpreter. The
solution of Satan and Eve becomes steadily more explicit; man
seeks to
solve the problem of God by becoming God in his own eyes.
According to Van Til,
If Kants position were to be retained both knowledge and faith
would be destroyed. Knowledge and faith are not contradictories
but complementaries. Kant did not make room for faith because
he destroyed the God on whom alone faith is to be fixed. It is true
of course, that Kant spoke of a God as possibly existing. This God,
however, could not be more than a finite God since He at least did
not or did not need to have original knowledge of the phenomenal
world. Kant thought that man could get along without God in the
matter of scientific knowledge. It is thus that the representational
principle which we saw to be the heart of the Christian-theistic
theory of knowledge is set aside. If man knows certain facts whether
or not God knows those facts, as would be the case if the Kantian
position were true . . . whatever sort of God may remain He is not
the supreme interpretative category of human experience.30
Hereafter the notions of being, cause and purpose must stand for
orderings we ourselves have made; they must never stand for
anything that exists beyond the reach of our experience. Any God
who wants to make himself known, it is now more clear than ever
before, will have to do so by identifying himself exhaustively with his
revelation. And any God who is so revealed, it is now more clear than
ever before, will then have to be wholly hidden in pure
possibility. Neither Plato nor Aristotle were entitled by the
methods of reasoning they employed, to reach the Unconditioned.
The Unconditioned cannot be rationally related to man. There is
no doubt but that Kant was right in this claim. Plato and Aristotle
no less than Kant assumed the autonomy of man. On such a basis
man may reason univocally and reach a God who is virtually an
extension of himself or he may reason equivocally and reach a God
who has no contact with him at all. Nor will adding two zeros
produce more than zero.31
When Kant said that man could have knowledge apart from
God, he maintained thereby the self-sufficiency of the
phenomenal world and of the self. And yet Kant could not make
an absolute of the phenomenal world, because it is the world
of time which is itself subjective. Neither could he say that
mans reason was valid for another order of being or inclusive
of all
possibility. Thus neither the universe, the mind of man, or the
phenomenal world gave man any absolute or any ground of
validity for his knowledge. For Kants arguments against
Christian theism to be valid,
. . . they must really be valid for all possible existence and thus be
inclusive of the future as well as of the past. In other words Kant
needs an absolute in order to make his arguments effective. . . .
Accordingly, it is fair to say that Kant had to presuppose the
existence of God before he could disprove it. It is thus that Kant
has slain univocal arguments for the existence of God by a univocal
argument against such arguments and has at the same time killed
all univocal reasoning by showing that all univocal reasoning,
including his own, presupposes analogical reasoning. As Samson died
when he slew his enemies, so Kant died when he slew his.32
The issues, as Van Til points out, have been greatly clarified
as a result of Kants work. Anti-theism is insistent on
interpreting reality in exclusively temporal categories and in
rejecting any distinction between divine and human thought.
Reasoning must be univocal. The ontological trinity is
absolutely rejected as destructive of all history and reason.
Christian theistic thought looms more clearly as the enemy of
both pragmatism and idealism, both of which develop Kants
creativity of thought in their respective directions.
It is clear from Van Tils analysis of the history of philosophy
that the difference between Christian theism and anti-theism
is not confined to the existence of God but to the whole field of
knowledge. Instead of both sharing a common knowledge of the
world and being in disagreement as to whether God exists, or
can and need be known, we have instead a radical disagreement
as to the nature of all knowledge.
Christian theisms fundamental contention is just this, that nothing
whatever can be known unless God can be and is known. In
whatever way we put the question then the important thing to
note is this fundamental difference between theism and anti-theism
on the question of epistemology. There is not a spot in heaven or
on earth
about which there is no dispute between the two opposing parties.
And it is the point that can bear much emphasis again and again.33
It is this insistence that constitutes the originality of Van Tils
insight as well as the offense of his position.
The struggle therefore is one that covers the whole field of
knowledge. It is precisely this that must be recognized as the
basic issue. It is the Christian-theistic conception that nothing
can be truly known unless God can be and is known, and this
discrepancy and disagreement between the contending
philosophies is apparent as we consider the question of the
object of knowledge.
The object of knowledge is anything that is considered a fact,
and here again the difference is obvious. What is a fact? Facts
can belong to the physical world, to the realm of psychology,
economics, mathematics, and so on. But what is a fact? Each
philosophy differs as to what constitutes a fact. The conception
of the physical world and the facts thereof vary radically in
Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. The facts vary from
philosophy to philosophy; they are precisely the point of
difference, in that each begins with certain basic assumptions
and presuppositions.
What our opponents mean by the existence of any fact is existence
apart from God. That they mean just this is indisputable for the
reason that such existence apart from God is ipso facto predicated
for all fact except of the fact of God if the fact of God is
called a question. For any one to call the existence of God in
question he must at least exist and possibly exist apart from God.
It appears then that the very connotation of the term existence is in
question. The anti-theist maintains that the term existence may
be applied as a predicate to any fact even if the fact of Gods
existence is not a fact. On the other hand the Theist maintains that
the term existence cannot be applied intelligently to any fact
unless the fact of Gods existence is a fact. In other words the
anti-theist assumes that we can begin by reasoning univocally
while the Theist maintains that we cannot begin otherwise than by
reasoning analogically.34
The denotation and connotation of any fact cannot be separated.
Every fact is and is what it is and means what it means by virtue
of its creation by and place in the total providence of God and is
not truly known on any other grounds.
There are, Van Til points out, those who insist that it is
intelligible to think of the non-existence of God but who at the
same time insist that we cannot intelligently think of the
non-existence of man and his world. Each begins with a reality,
a basic fact, which he insists must be taken for granted. Van Til
sees four positions as possible with regard to the question of
existence and non-existence. First, we can believe it reasonable
to doubt the existence of God but not intelligible to doubt the
existence of the universe. Second, we can doubt the existence of
both God and the universe as the only intelligible step. Third,
we can insist that it is not intelligible to doubt the existence of
either God or the universe. Fourth, we may hold it possible to
think intelligibly of the non-existence of the universe but
impossible to doubt the existence of God. Of these four positions,
only the last is consistent with theism, not because Christianity
denies the existence of the universe, but because it cannot
consider the universe as the ultimate reality and therefore the
ground of all thought. Without God, nothing can exist, and
therefore God alone is the starting point of all intelligible
thinking.
A persons conception of what constitutes a fact is thus
governed by his starting point. It is here necessary to
distinguish with Van Til between an immediate and an
ultimate starting point. He explains it by the analogy of a diving
board. A diver, standing on the tip of a board and seeing
nothing around him but water can state that the end of the board
is his starting point in an immediate sense. But in an ultimate
sense the foundation of the whole board is his starting point, and
he cannot eliminate from his recognition of his situation all
except the tip and the water. As Van Til insists, the question at
issue in philosophy is not that of the immediate starting point.
All agree that the immediate starting point must be that of our
everyday experi-
ence and the facts that are most close at hand. But the exact
charge we are making against so many Idealists as well as
Pragmatists is that they are taking for granted certain
temporal facts not only as a temporary but as an ultimate
starting point.35 Similarly, the Bible is not to be used as a source
book in biology or to replace a paleontological study in Africa.
The Bible does not claim to offer a rival theory that may or
may not be true. It claims to have the truth about all facts.36 It
is not claimed that one should go to the Bible instead of to
Africa; what is claimed is that without the God of the Bible and
the revelation therein given no fact can be truly known, nor can
its existence be even posited. The opponents of Christian-theism
insist on taking for granted that specifically which they need to
and cannot prove, the independence and ultimacy of the mind
and of brute factuality. Moreover, all facts owe not only their
existence but their denotation and connotation to God, and
every fact exists and must be known, if it is truly known, as a
Christian theistic fact. Without the light of Scripture, no fact
can be truly known. Not only facts, but all nature and history
exist in terms of eternal categories.
Christian thinkers like Augustine and especially Calvin have
been ready to take the human self as the proximate starting
point, while anti-theistic philosophy takes the self as an ultimate
starting point. This latter emphasis has become more consistently
pronounced. Moreover, modern philosophy is less concerned
with the object of knowledge than with the subject of knowledge,
and the self is assumed to be the ultimate subject of knowledge.
But the very challenge of Christian theistic philosophy
. . . is that God is the ultimate subject of knowledge. Man is and
can be a subject of knowledge in a derived sense because God is
the subject of knowledge in an absolute sense. Theologically
expressed we say that mans knowledge is true because man has been
created in the image of God. And for this reason too there can be
no dispute about the relative priority of the intellect and the feeling
of man. Since the personality of God is a complete unity so also
the personality of man is a unity.37
The charge against all anti-theistic thought is that it is
subjective, in that it sets up human thought or consciousness as
the ultimate standard of truth. Because its concept of truth is
derived from the mind or from experience, modern philosophy
leads inevitably to a complete relativism in epistemology and
metaphysics. At times it frankly forsakes the quest for truth and
certainty, but it never candidly admits that the logical alternative
is total relativism. In liberal theology, the same relativism is
latent or explicit, and what passes for theology is little more
than anthropology, and experience is emphasized as against
truth or as the essence of truth. The sources of liberal and
neo-orthodox theology are to be found in three main schools of
philosophy, first in pragmatism, which assumes the subjective
validity of all religion irrespective of its object. Next are the
naturalists who emphasize logic rather than time and reduce
whatever God may be tolerated to a logical universal binding
together equally ultimate particulars. Last we have the
idealists for whom God is the absolute, but a significantly
empty absolute, in that the difference between God and man,
and time and eternity, is erased by embracing all in a
common and ultimate reality. Thus all are equally ultimate
and God is a part of the universe rather than its creator and
sustainer. God and man are alike aspects of reality; therefore,
God at best can function as an associate or elder brother,
assisting man in the interpretation of a reality He did not create
and must Himself struggle to understand. God becomes a
logical necessity rather than creator. Man is as necessary to
God as God to man (as witness the philosophy of Pringle
Pattison). By a constant insistence on the correlativity of time
and eternity, and God and man, idealism tries to gain for man
and time a status in terms of ultimate reality. All are alike
embraced in a common and ultimate reality.38
Not only is there a radical difference between Christian
theistic thought and anti-theistic philosophy with regard to the
starting point of knowledge, but also, as we have seen, over the
question as to whether the existence of the object of knowledge
can be taken for granted apart from God. Furthermore, in view
of the sinful nature of man, the interpretation in terms of God
must come through Scripture. Error is the result of sin, although
not all error in logic is due to sin directly. Nevertheless, the
mind of man is in rebellion against and in enmity to God and
establishes itself as its own God and own principle of
interpretation. Man seeks to think creatively rather than to think
Gods thoughts after Him. Evil is the result of mans rebellion
against God and is not original or ultimate, and because it is not,
evil cannot be predicated of God or considered ultimate. Prior to
the fall, the world and man were good, and evil and error were
introduced by mans rebellion. Mans fall was his attempt to
become the original interpreter rather than the re-interpreter,
to be the ultimate instead of the proximate source of knowledge.
Prior to the fall, Van Til asserts, man acted as the re-interpreter,
recognizing that since he derived his being wholly and
completely from an absolute God, his every act therefore was
based on a more original and fundamental act of God. Man now
must be restored to a like position, forsaking his role of original
interpretation for re-interpretation, recognizing moreover
that his consciousness is only the proximate starting point for
knowledge. But man the sinner virtually insists that his present
fallen and abnormal condition is the normal one and is
resentful of any suggestion of abnormal mentality. As Van Til
has pointed out, in the country of the blind, the man with sight
was called a wild visionary. For the Christian, however, the
answer is an absolute God, an absolute Bible, and absolute
regeneration. The creative act and thought must be Gods alone.
Nothing which hints of the correlativity of God and man, of
eternity and time, can be permitted. By such correlativity,
idealism seeks to rehabilitate history, but in making historical
reality exist in independence of God, it destroys the sovereignty
of God, and the meaning of history. Evil becomes as ultimate as
the good, and history becomes an irreconcilable and
meaningless conflict. History has meaning and purpose only
when wholly, i.e., finally, determined by the personal and
sovereign God. Man then
moves in a personal and purposive world, and time has direction
and meaning. Instead of an impersonal universe in which good
and evil are equally ultimate, he moves in a completely personal
universe in which his activities have meaning, good is ultimately
triumphant and every fact is purposive in terms of a common
and ultimate will. Mans re-interpretation is possible because
of Gods prior and absolute interpretation. History has meaning
precisely because it is absolutely predestined by God. Mans
activity is not mechanically determined because he lives in a
completely personal environment and moves in purposive and
personal history. Only as the ethical alienation of man from God
is removed, can man again act derivatively and constructively
in the field of Gods original constructive activity and
re-establish the original metaphysical relationship. For Van Til,
there is no underlying metaphysical separation of man from
God but rather an ethical alienation, a divorce with all the
bitterness and alienation which attends such a situation. Any
other conception of God makes God no more than an elder
brother, setting an example for man and assisting men in their
common task of trying to make sense of a senseless universe
which is the ultimate reality. For the Christian, the physical
universe is explicable also in terms of the spiritual because both
have a common origin and unity in God.
It follows from this that the spiritual can be truly though
symbolically expressed by the images borrowed from the physical. It
is this conception that underlies Jesus use of parabolic teaching.
The vine and the branches give metaphorical but truthful expression
to the spiritual union between Jesus and his own because the
physical is created for the purpose of giving expression to the
spiritual. We find then that one must first pre-suppose the
anti-theistic conception that nature is independent of God before
one can urge the argument that symbolical language is necessarily
to an extent untruthful.39
Not only is language robbed of content by the anti-theistic
position, but mans salvation is made impossible. With any
conception of autonomous man, salvation disappears. Man is
not
subject to the covenant and to federal representation in Christ,
and hence the atonement can have no meaning for man, who
becomes isolated in his autonomy and a world of brute
factuality. At the same time, this autonomy of man destroys his
individuality and personality, in that he becomes lost in an
impersonal world of brute factuality. Reality being ultimately
an undifferentiated mass and equally good and evil, humanity
also is ultimately an undifferentiated mass, and mass man
becomes a problem.
In considering the subject-subject relationship, the usual
question is whether, under this Christian view, it is any use for
the Christian-theist to reason with his opponents or to seek their
understanding of the Christian view of things. Since
regeneration is required, of what value is philosophy? To answer
this, we must again consider the problem of knowledge. All
objects of knowledge in time and space, having been created
by God, to be truly known must be known in relation to God.
As Van Til asserts, the universals of knowledge as well as the
objects of knowledge have their source in God and their
relationships are in terms of the plan of God. The anti-theist,
however, not only begins with the facts or objects of knowledge
as ultimate, but also regards the universals as ultimate, and
neither has anything to do with God. No reference beyond the
facts and universals is needed. If God exists, therefore, he can
only be another fact, another object of knowledge, rather than
the one supreme object of knowledge, the ultimate fact and the
ultimate universal. With such a discrepancy between the two
views, it is not surprising that each considers the other blind.
But, Van Til states, the subject-subject relationship is not a
problem if the subjects are Christian, or if they are unregenerate.
The clash comes between the two opposing groups. To answer
this, Van Til feels that it must be noted first that the normal
state of man is that his whole consciousness, intellect, will or
emotion, was created to be completely re-interpretative. Second,
the revelation of God, manifested everywhere in a wholly
personal universe, comes to the whole consciousness of man.
Since
God is absolute, man is always accessible to Him and can never
escape His witness and truth. Mans alienation from God is
ethical; it cannot alter his metaphysical dependence on God.
Because man is thus wholly accessible to God and resides in and
is part of a completely personal universe, it then follows that
all creation is instrumental in terms of the divine plan, and our
philosophy is also instrumental.
The Christian can effectively attack every ground the
anti-theist stands on, because the anti-theist is constantly on alien
and hostile ground. When he sets up his reason as judge, and
appeals to the law of contradiction, he contradicts himself, in
that his universe is one of chance and abstract possibility, and
reason and the law of contradiction are thereby rendered invalid.
When a Christian thinker like Carnell declares, Bring on your
revelation! Let them make peace with the law of contradiction
and the facts of history, and they will deserve a rational mans
assent,40 he has set up rational man, regenerate and
unregenerate, as the criterion and judge over God and His truth.
A criterion above Christianity itself which derives from man
establishes mans ultimacy and supremacy as mind.
On any but the Christian basis man, using this reason, is a product
of Chance and the facts which he supposedly orders by the law of
contradiction are also products of Chance. Why should a law of
contradiction resting on Chance be better than a revolving door
moving nothing out of nowhere into no place? Only on the
presupposition that the self-contained God of Scripture controls all
things, can man know himself or anything else. But on this
presupposition the whole of his experience makes good sense. Thus
a truly Christian philosophy is the only possible philosophy. Other
philosophies are or should be called such by courtesy. Those who
crucify reason while worshipping it, those who kill the facts as they
gather them, ought not really to be called philosophers. Insisting
upon reason as the test of truth they have completely divorced the
operation of reason from the turmoil of fact. They cannot find
coherence in anything on their principle. Fear, nothing but fear
in the dark, remains. Aldous Huxleys latest novel Apes and Es-
Sence pictures strikingly the inevitable result of a philosophy
that is not a definite Christian philosophy.41
For the theist, the possible is that which is according to the
will and nature of the absolutely self-conscious God, and God
alone is the source of the possible, whereas for anti-theism the
possible is the source of God. Thus their concepts of possibility
differ. The division between the two is not always clearly
dis-cernable because of incidental agreements. Because the
non-regenerate, by virtue of common grace, have a kind of
recognition of what should be though it is not, they come to
an incidental agreement with the Christian. The agreement is
incidental, Van Til demonstrates, because their consciousness
gives other grounds for the fact at hand. As Van Til has
pointed out, the pragmatist agrees with the Christian in
opposing murder, but for pragmatic and humanistic reasons,
whereas for the Christian the real reason is a concept of justice
which has its foundation in the nature of the sovereign God. It
becomes apparent at once also that they differ in their concept
of justice, and that their agreement is incidental, formal and
abstract. Moreover, even this incidental agreement exists only
with regard to things proximate rather than things ultimate.
Thus it is imperative to recognize that two types of
consciousness exist, and that we cannot talk about reason in the
abstract. The consistently regenerate reason and the
consistently unregenerate reason have fundamental
presuppositions regarding the nature of reason and reality which
cannot be reconciled. However, Van Til calls attention to a
fundamental and general human consciousness which existed
before the fall. Adams consciousness was re-interpretative and
his knowledge valid. Although the range of his knowledge could
not be as comprehensive as Gods, its validity did not rest on
range, because he reasoned in an atmosphere of revelation.
His very mind with its laws was a revelation of God.
Accordingly, he would reason analogically and not univocally.
He would always be presupposing God in his every intellectual
operation.42 Although man is now fallen, and the unregenerate
man ethically alienated from God, he can never become God as
he seeks to be. He can never in reality exert the independence he
claims. He remains metaphysically dependent on God. As a
result, his consciousness, even in rebellion cannot sever itself
from God but retains a formal power of receptivity. Moreover,
the ethical alienation is not yet complete in degree. As a result,
the Christian can speak to the unregenerate. For Van Til,
metaphysically, only one type of consciousness exists, one in
dependence upon God; ethically, two types of consciousness exist.
On the basis of the one fundamental metaphysical consciousness,
the subject-subject relationship is possible and effective. The
unregenerate must be told that the Christian-theist has the true
conception of the law of contradiction, i.e.,
Only that is self-contradictory which is contradictory to the
conception of the absolute self-consciousness of God. If there were
in the trinity such a self-contradiction there would also be in the
matter of Gods relation to the world. But, since the trinity is the
conception by which ultimate unity and diversity is brought into
equal ultimacy, it is this conception of the trinity which makes
self-contradiction impossible for God and therefore also
impossible for man. Complete self-contradiction is possible only in
hell and hell is itself a self-contradiction because it feeds eternally
on the negation of an absolute affirmation. Accordingly, we must
hold that the position of our opponent has in reality been reduced to
contradiction when it is shown to be hopelessly opposed to the
Christian-theistic concept of God. Yet in order to bring this
argument as closely to the nonregenerate consciousness as we may
we must seek to show that the non-theist is self-contradictory upon
his own assumptions, as well as upon the assumption of the truth of
theism and that he cannot even be self-contradictory upon a
non-theistic basis since if he saw himself to be self-contradictory he
would be self-contradictory no longer.
Now when this method of reasoning from the impossibility of the
contrary is carried out, there is really nothing more to do. We realize
this if we call to mind again that if once it is seen that the conception
of God is necessary for the intelligible interpretation of any fact, it
will be seen that this is necessary for all facts. If one really saw that
it is necessary to have God in order to understand the grass that
grows outside his window he would certainly come to a saving
knowledge of Christ, and to the knowledge of the absolute
authority of the Bible. . . . It is well to emphasize this fact because
there are Fundamentalists who tend to throw over-board all
epistemological and metaphysical investigation and say that they
will limit their activities to preaching Christ. But we see that they
are not really preaching Christ unless they are preaching Him for
what He wants to be, namely, the Christ of cosmical significance.
Nor can they even long retain the soteriological significance of
Christ, if they forsake His cosmological significance. If one allows
that certain facts may be truly known apart from God in Christ
there is no telling where the limit will be.48
Every claim of the anti-theist must be challenged and revealed
for what it is. The agnosticism of modern thinking claims a
scientific humility and reserve in the face of the unknown. But
in its very assertion of agnosticism it makes a tremendous
statement about ultimate reality in that it excludes God as the
ultimate fact and limits Him to the possibility of being a fact
among facts. All mans thinking rests on a concept of ultimate
reality, and agnosticism definitely excludes God as ultimate
reality and allows Him only the possibility of correlativity and
co-existence. To say that science makes no pronouncement
about the ontological trinity is to ascribe to science a
tremendous pronouncement, one which makes brute factuality
the ultimate reality. A universal negative statement virtually is
made with vast implications. Facts exist in a void, and nothing
can be said about the void unless it is posited that some
universals exist beyond the void. Thus agnosticism cannot
argue for its position without assuming far more than its position
allows. Basically, as Van Til shows, it assumes the truth of the
Christian-theistic system in o rder to operate and assert itself.
It is self-contradictory on Christian premises, and
self-contradictory on its own premises unless theism is
assumed to be true. The unbeliever is thus able to think and
work only on the basis of a practical reason which presupposes
the Christian frame of things.
On his own premises, he can know nothing; on bor rowed
premises, he is able to think and work, but for all his results, he
remains in the paradoxical position of the cattle rustler
mentioned previously. He has no knowledge on the basis of his
own principles; he has valid knowledge only as a thief possesses
stolen goods. As V an T il bluntly states the iss ue,
The question is one of this or nothing. The argument in favor of
Christian theism must therefore seek to prove that if one is not a
Christian-theist he knows nothing whatsoever as he ought to know
about anything. The difference is not that all men alike know certain
things about the finite universe and that some claim some additional
knowledge while the others do not. On the contrary the
Christian-theist must claim that he alone has true knowledge
about cows and chickens as well as about God. He does this in no
spirit of conceit because it is to himself a gift of Gods grace. Nor
does he deny that there is knowledge after a fashion that enables
the non-theist to get along after a fashion in the world. This is the
gift of God's common grace and therefore does not change the
absoluteness of the distinction made about the knowledge and the
ignorance of the theist and the non-theist respectively.44
Christian philosophy must point out that anti-theism destroys
knowledge and reason and cannot exist on its own
presuppositions. The autonomous man cannot forever flee back
and forth between the arid mountains of timeless logic and the
shoreless ocean of pure potentiality. He must at last be brought to
bay. 45 In Van Til we have a truly Christian philosophy, one
based fully on the presuppos itions of Christianity and doing
justice to the unity and variety of human experience. Because of
its Christian character, it avoids the pitfalls of rationalism and
irrationalism. On the basis of the ontological trinity, a truly
Christian system is developed of great and far-reaching
importance. The issues raised by Van Til are to be reckoned
with, and no man can claim to espouse a Christian philosophy
without coming to terms with these presuppositions as outlined
by Van T il.
We began this s urvey of Van Tils challenge to epistemology
with a stor y of a naked emperor. We saw that man, naked in
his ethical alienation from God, seeks to clothe himself in a
metaph ysical independence fr om God. In other words, m an
seeks to clothe himself by robbing God and leaving Him naked.
But the attempt is presumption and an impossibility and only
emphasizes the nakedness of man, his ethical rebellion against
God and at the same time his total metaphysical dependence
upon Him. Man cannot rob God, cannot gain a metaphysical
independence, and every claim to autonom y is so much
emperors clothes, a hollow pretension which only reveals
more nakedly the natural mans misshapen nature. Van T il is
right, therefore, when he says in effect, as he surveys the natural
man and his philosophies, that the emperor has no clothes. He
that hath ears to hear , let him hear. In Van T il and in
Dooyeweerd, we have the cleares t and most consistent
formulation of the principles of Christian philosophy. Moreover,
because Van Til br ings to such clear focus the issues between
Christian-theism and anti-theism, his philosophy constitutes a
stone of stumbling and a rock of offense (Isa. 8:14) to those whose
philosophic concern is to break down the offense of Christianity
to the natural man. God and His philosophers call attention to
mans nakedness and offer him the robes of God in Christ; the
compromisers insist that the natural man is fully clothed; it is
only his overcoat that is lacking. This is blindness, not only
concerning the natural man, but with regard to themselves and to
God. Not only of the emperor but of his philosophers it must be
said, T hey have no clothes.
NOTES
1. Alan Richardson: Christian Apologetics, p. 150 (Harper, New York).

2. Intro, to B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, p. 18
(Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia).
3. Ibid., p. 22f.
4. Ibid., p. 35.
5. Van Til: Christianity in Modern Theology, pp. 18ff.
6. Ibid., p. 80f.
7. P. 65f., cited in Van Til: The New Modernism, p. 173.
8. Van Til: Christianity and Idealism, pp. 57-74.
9. Ibid., p. 134.
10. Van Til: Metaphysics of Apologetics, p. 12.
11. Ibid., p. 14.
12. Ibid., p. 15.
13. Ibid., p. 16.
14. Van Til: Metaphysics of Apologetics, p. 20. Cf. Van Til: Nature and
Scripture in The Infallible Word, pp. 255ff.
16. Ibid., p. 38.
17. Ibid., p. 46.
18. Ibid., p. 57.
19. Sheen, p. 226 cited in Van Til, op. cit., p. 58.
20. Ibid., p. 66.
21. Ibid., p. 66f.
22. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and its Theology, p. 350 cited in
Van Til, op. cit., p. 65.
23. Ibid., p. 72
24. Ibid., p. 88.
25. Ibid., p. 99.
26. Ibid., p. 90. When Van Til says that the principles of unity and diversity
must be equally original, this is a biblical must, made necessary because God is
one God and yet triune. The equal ultimacy of the one and many is directly
derived from the doctrine of the Trinity.
27. Ibid., p. 95.
28. Ibid., p. 99.
29. Van Til: Nature and Scripture in The Infallible Word, p. 285.
31. Van Til: Nature and Scripture from The Infallible Word, p. 289.
33. Ibid., p. 107.
34. Ibid., p. 108.
35. Ibid., p. 110.
36. Ibid., p. 114.
37. Ibid., p. 122.
38. For Van Tils analyses of contemporary philosophies and theologies see
Metaphysics of Apologetics, Defense of the Faith, Christianity and Idealism,
Christianity in Modern Theology, The New Modernism, etc.
40. Cited by Van Til in Christian Philosophy, a pamphlet, quoting E. J.
Carnell, An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (Eerdmans, Grand Rapir1'
Mich.), p. 178, 4th ed., rev. 1952.
41. Van Til: Christian Philosophy.
43. Ibid., p. 181b.
44. Ibid., p. 194.
45. Van Til: Nature and Scripture, p. 293.
4.
The Psychology of Religion:
Integration into the Void
Since 1890, but with admitted roots in Kant and

Schleier-macher, the psychology of religion has become a new
area of knowledge and study, and also a new form of attack on
orthodox Christianity. Accordingly, Van Til has given it special
attention, for here, in an ostensibly scientific manner, religion is
studied without metaphyiscal and epistemological
presuppositions. Facts are approached directly and allowed to
speak for themselves. Such, at any rate, is the mythology of the
psychology of religion. Contemporary scholarship, believing
itself to be free from the religious strings and human myths of
past eras, believing itself to be father to pure science and
objective knowledge, has perhaps begotten myths as
far-reaching as any in history, and as naive.
According to the psychology of religion, the meaning of
religion is to be learned by a study of the religious consciousness
of man. Thus, not the creedal statements, holy books, histories
of philosophies of religion are central, nor God Himself, or any
gods conceivably existing, but rather man in his experience.
Supposedly without prejudice, they approach all men of all
religious faiths in terms of their religious consciousness. By this
very act, however, they presuppose the centrality of the
consciousness and make two far-reaching assumptions
concerning it. As Van Til has pointed out, first, the
metaphysical independence of the self-consciousness of man in
general and of the religious consciousness in particular
underlies the psychology of religion. But if we are Christians
at all we believe the cre-
65
ation doctrine and this makes man dependent upon God
metaphysically. Second, it is assumed that the
self-consciousness of man in general and of his religious
consciousness in particular has an ethical independence from
God. But as Christians we must assert that the doctrine of sin
makes man dependent upon G od while ethically alienated from
Him . 1
The ps ycholog y of r eligion attempts to s tud y religion from
the inside and not from the outs ide. T raditional theolog y
is accused of studying religion from the outside, while the
ps ychology of religion, in concentrating on the religious
consciousness studies it from the inside. This as Van Til shows,
is a most signficant presupposition. It is assumed that the
objective reference of religion is of secondary or no significance,
that God, or whatever gods exist, is not as centr al or as much
inside the area of significance and meaning as mans
consciousness. Religion is thus assumed to be basically
man-centered rather than God-centered. Before a single fact is
studied, therefore, a metaphysics has been presupposed. Moreover,
in assuming that the religious consciousness and the world of
phenomena constitute the proper area of study and knowledge, an
epistemology is presupposed. Thus before the science of the
ps ychology of religion begins to operate, an extensive
metaphysics and epistemology in terms of autonomous man is
assumed which predetermines what shall constitute a fact. While
formally originating in the 1890s, and descending from Kant and
Schleiermacher, the ps ychology of religion can, as V an T il
asserts , be traced back to Paradise and to E ve. When Eve
listened to Satans temptation to be as God and to know and
determine metaphys ics and ethics in terms of her own
consciousness, she submitted to the claim and assertion that her
created consciousness could best know itself, reality, and her
religious consciousness if she cut herself loose from God. Only
then would a fair and open-minded knowledge be possible. The
outside witness is denied validity. T o assume that religion has
reference to God, and that mans consciousness, as a created
consciousness, can have no meaning apart from God and His
will, is regarded as being unscientific. T he truth or falsity of
religion becomes increasingly irrelevant; the significant area is
inside, in the human consciousness. The religious
consciousness must be a complete statement within itself; it
cannot be dependent on any superhuman or supernatural
elements without losing its validity and its scientific nature. God
therefore can exist only as an aspect of human consciousness and
experience; the basic reality is man. Although not all religious
ps ychologists are cons istent in maintaining this position, even
John Baillie in commenting on Socrates, is ready to say, We
are then doing no more than following the ver y oldest tradition
in this matter if we define the business of theological science as
the interrogation of the religious consciousness with a view to
discovering what religion is. 2 Thus, according to Van Til, the
ps ychology of religion first assumes a false neutrality while
actually being committed to a metaphysics and epistemology,
and, second, it assumes that the mind of man is central and can
and does act independently of God. T hir d, it is assumed that
the mind of man not only acts independently but is a
self-contained entity. All these are assumptions which should be
first established metaphysically and epistemologically. As Van
Til comments, We maintain that their s tarting p oint makes it
incumbent up on them to show us that it is reasonable to
suppose that human exper ience, the human consciousness, has
sprung out of the void. 3 James, Baillie, Pratt, Leuba, Ames and
others all assume that which of necessity they must first prove.
Often they candidly ad m it t he ar b i tr ar i nes s of th is de fi n itio n
of r e lig io n , b u t only to assert, as does James Bissett Pratt, that
this, like all other definitions of religion, is more or less
arbitrary 4 because they hold to an ultimate philosop hical
skepticism when it suits their purposes. Because the religious
consciousness is determinative for them in defining religion,
they will not limit their definition to the Christian consciousness
but work in terms of a general religious consciousness of the
human race, including all faiths from all cultures. This is a logical
procedure. If the universe is the chance product of a purposeless
reality, and the race of man has evolved out of an ocean of bare
possibility, then it becomes nat-
ural for us to consult the majority to establish the truth. But, in
terms of such an approach, truth itself becomes remote, because
mans knowledge of the ocean of bare possibility is too
fragmentary for any adequate report on truth. Thus, even the
majority opinion of the religious consciousness gives no more
than a report on a particular phase of phenomena and nothing
more. But if the universe is indeed created by God, then mans
religious consciousness, or, more accurately, his conscious and
subconscious life are also created by God and bear witness to
Him. And because mans conscious and subconscious life since
the Fall is under the influence of sin and ethical alienation from
God, it follows that his religious consciousness expresses that
alienation in terms of false religion and a man-centered rather
than God-centered orientation. To assume the ultimacy of chance,
the independence of the human consciousness from God, and the
centrality of the consciousness to religion and truth, is to begin,
not with scientific neutrality, but philosophical and religious
prejudice and predetermination of factuality. And this the
psychology of religion does.
Its method is governed by these myths. As Van Til points out,
position and method go hand in hand. The Christian method
always presupposes the existence of God, while the non-Christian
method leaves God out of consideration. In this latter
methodology they study, first, their own experience, second, the
religious experience of other living persons, and, third, religious
autobiographies and writings. The place where we look for
evidence reveals clearly what we consider valid evidence to be.
Furthermore, as Van Til adds, having determined by their
presuppositions what constitutes evidence, they must again
employ a standard of values in order to make a critical
evaluation of the material at hand.
In this way too, they say they are only applying the general
scientific method of modern times. As to the last claim, that the
psychologist of religion is simply seeking to apply the modern
scientific method, there can be no doubt but that this is true. Only,
we remark, this is no guarantee that its method is sound. We believe
that the modern scientific method itself is suffering from the same
disease that we have said the psychologists are suffering from
particularly, namely, they have no well thought out conception as
to the relation of the universal and the particular.5
Thus, the psychologist of religion, while claiming to do away
with all bias and to be neutral in his approach to religion, is
lacking in sufficient psychological insight to see his own bias
and utter lack of neutrality! He believes that he approaches
particulars without universals, failing to see that the very
particulars he approaches are already predetermined by his
universals. Of all myth-makers, none is more naive than
modern man!
Van Til summarizes the method and its presuppositions most
tellingly. First, it is assumed that the religious consciousness is
an independent entity. Second, the religious consciousness gives
witness to the idea of God, among other things. Third, authentic
manifestations of this religious consciousness are to be found
everywhere in the world. Fourth, the principles of
interpretation used in interpreting this religious consciousness
must be deduced entirely from the religious consciousness itself,
and only the end product of all this can be seriously called
theology in any scientific sense. This method and this alone is
regarded as valid because through this alone are we placed
directly in touch with objective reality, and the religious
consciousness is the domain of objective reality. Moreover, this
method first of all presupposes that the God of Scripture, the
ontological trinity, the self-existent and self-sufficient God, does
not exist. No God who establishes the principles of all
interpretation by virtue of His creation and His providence is
tolerated, but at best a limited God who must deal with an alien
universe. The self-sufficiency of God is replaced with the
self-sufficiency of the religious consciousness, and this is a point
of central importance. In recent years, the psychology of
religion has lost its position of eminence to existentialism, but the
self-sufficiency of the religious consciousness of autonomous
man remains as the constant factor on the changing theological
scene. And here is metaphysics even though it parades as
scientific neutrality. Second, the Christian distinction
between good and evil disappears, because evil is made equally
ultimate with good, and all manifestations of the religious
consciousness equally authentic. We might speak of this as an
ethics of the ultimacy of evil. Third, it is assumed that nothing
is true that cannot be verified in the religious consciousness of
every person. Hence it follows that the special revelations
granted to prophets must be excluded because they do not
constitute common human experience. Instead of the human
consciousness being regarded first as created and second as
fallen and hence perverted in its judgments, the human
consciousness is made self-sufficient and judge over God. Truth
is that which is verifiable in the religious consciousness of
Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, animist and everyone. Fourth, the
psychology of religion is definitely anti-intellectualistic in that
it seeks to get at religious experience prior to its intellectual
interpretation. Yet it is only through intellectual interpretation
that the religious experience can be spoken of to others. 6 This
goes hand in hand with an historic relativism.
When the psychology of religion claims that the facts are
allowed to speak for themselves, it reveals its utter inability to
recognize the nature of a fact. If factuality is brute factuality,
then, as Van Til points out, all the facts in any historical series
have equal value. It becomes impossible for any one historical
fact to be given eminence over another, or a particular group to
be singled out for use. No standard of judgment could be
evolved from a mere historical series.7 Moreover, no merely
historical series can raise any criterion or value in and by itself.
To assume that particulars in a series have relationship one to
another in terms of a universal is to assume more than any
historical series is capable of giving; it is to think metaphysically
rather than descriptively. Before the psychologist of religion
begins his search for a universal in the particular historical series
he designates as his field, he has already presupposed the
universal he claims to be intent on discovering. Moreover, he
has presupposed also the equal ultimacy of the eternal and the
temporal.
In this view, as Van Til shows, man becomes an absolutely
historical being; his life has no divine frame of reference and
created interpretation. As a result, mans life can only be
understood by understanding his history, because history alone is
the area of meaning, of both particulars and universals. And
since the particular supposedly is prior to the universal in this
approach, a search for the absolutely individual, the true
particular, ensues. Hence, the past becomes important, more so
than the future, and the past gives only an endless and never to
be completed process and procession of data. Then comes the
question what history is. Man as an exclusively historical being
becomes a problem to himself.8 All this points towards
nothing more than bare description and ultimate subjectivism,
towards a relativism which negates all meaning and makes
impossible a solution to the one and many problem.
Against all this, Christianity offers, as Van Til points out, a
solution to the one and many problem and an answer to the
historical problem created by relativism. First of all, basic to the
Christian view is the metaphysical presupposition involved in
the doctrine of creation, that God is an absolutely self-conscious
and self-sufficient being, an absolute personality, triune in
nature and the solution of the one and many problem. There is
no remnant of unconsciousness of potentiality in the being of
God because the persons of the trinity are mutually
exhaustive.
Thus there cannot be anything unknown to God that springs from
His own nature. Then too there was nothing existing beyond this
God before the creation of the universe. Hence the time-space world
cannot be a source of independent particularity. The space-time
universe cannot even be a universe of exclusive particularity. It is
brought forth by the creative act of God, and this means in
accordance with the plan or the universal of God. Hence there
must be in this world universals as well as particulars. Moreover
they can never exist in independence of one another. They must
be equally ultimate which means in this case that they are both
derivative. Now inasmuch as this is the case God cannot be
confronted
by an absolute particularity that springs from the space-time universe
any more than He can be confronted by an absolute particularity
that should spring from a potential aspect of His own being. Hence
in God the One and the Many are equally ultimate which in this
case means absolutely ultimate.9
Second, Christianity has, as Van Til states, the epistemological
presupposition of revelation. All facts being created facts,
factuality can only be understood in subordination to God. But
to understand factuality, man needs a norm, and this Scripture
provides.
These two presuppositions give a standard of judgment, which,
applied to the psychology of religion, leads immediately to
certain conclusions. First of all, Van Til asserts, the Christian
theist will not seek for the origin or nature of religion in
historism, in a search for the absolute particular, in an
attempt to establish a native witness for religion in the particular
historical person in isolation from and independent of God.
Second, neither will the consistent Christian seek his
knowledge in an impersonal eternalism as the alternative to the
blind alley of the absolute particular. Such a course is, as
Van Til points out, a flight from one blind alley into another.
Third, neither is there any solution to be found in a mixture of
temporalism and eternalism. Blindness added to blindness gives
no sight. This course takes reality as it is as ultimate and anwers
no questions concerning the permanent and the changeable,
the historical and the eternal, the particular and the universal.
These three points are again stated by Van Til in another aspect.
First, the method of abstract description is denied. This is
merely historism and involves a metaphysics of temporalism.
Second, rejected also is the method of explanation that seeks
for a norm in abstract universals which are thought of as
eternal, and, third, we will not follow those who seek for a
combination of description and explanation by seeking to find
the universal as well as the particular in the temporal stream.10
Van Tils approach involves, first of all, the concept of God
as absolute personality and the standard of human thought.
Mans thinking is analogical to Gods thinking. Man does not
live independently of God, nor does he live independently of the
humanity of which he is a member. His individuality is real, but
it is dependent and part of a whole, and his witness to God is not
independent and native, but is based on the presupposition of
God. Since God is the ground of mans being, and mans
thinking must be analogical, then it follows that mans witness to
God must be reflective. But since God has created man as a
harmonious unity, the feelings cannot be set in opposition to the
intellect, although the answer will be in the direction of
rationality rather than irrationality. Moreover, since the frame
of reference is always to the absolute God, it follows that all
religions cannot be true but only that which recognizes God and
uses Him as its standard of religion. Thus the native religious
consciousness cannot be accepted at face value but only in terms
of its reference to the one true religion. Second, God having
spoken in Scripture, the Scriptures must be used to determine
what is true and false. God had to make Himself known
externally in order that the sinner might know Him at all. 11
The psychology of religion has, according to Van Til,
followed general psychology in what he so aptly calls its steady
trend towards integration into the void. Nineteenth century
general psychology, associationism, was Cartesian and
characterized by intellectualism and atomism and a belief that
the mind of man is independent of God. Twentieth century
psychology has furthered the revolt against Christian theism by
wiping out the borderline that separated man from the beast,
and the beast from the inorganic world, thus reducing man to
a focus of action and interaction in the sea of an ultimate
irrationalism.12
First came the rebellion against the intellectualism of
associationism. From Van Tils perspective this was
potentially healthy, in that biblical faith equalizes all aspects of
mans personality, but the dethroning of the intellect was not
done for theistic reasons but to promote irrationalism. Second,
the new psychology reacted against the separation of the soul
from the
body. Again, Van Til recognizes the potentially theistic value of
this step, but not when its purpose is to wipe out the distinction
between soul and body. Third, the new psychology gave
particular emphasis to child psychology, whereas the older was
almost an adult psychology which treated children as miniature
adults. The intellectualism of the older view could do no justice
to the individual, whereas the new, by emphasizing the
emotional and volitional in man, inevitably emphasizes
individuality. The Christian insists on justice being done to the
emotional and volitional, as well as the individuality of man, but
only in terms of the image of God. The new psychology,
according to Van Til, holds to an ultimate activism, with
personality viewed as mans self-accomplishment rather than
the creation of God. As Van Til observes,
According to the Christian view, then, variability can mean only
that mans personality is not fully developed when created but
grows into the pattern set for it by God. The activity by which
personality realizes itself is to be sure, very genuine and significant
only because it acts before the background of the plan of God. The
integration of personality, that is, the constant readjustment of the
particular and the universal within itself, and the constant
readjustment of the whole personality as an individual to the
universal found in the universe beyond itself, takes place by a more
ultimate and constant readjustment of the individual together with
his surroundings to God who is the absolute particular and the
absolute universal combined in one ultimate personality. The
integration of personality, according to the Christian view, is an
integration toward and by virtue of an ultimate self-sufficient
personality. In contrast with this the modern concept of the
integration of personality is an integration into the void. We can
best appreciate this if we note that the concept purpose itself has been
completely internalized.13
Fourth, the decline into irrationalism saw next the emphasis
on the unconscious. The adult is to be interpreted in terms of
the child, and both adult and child are to be understood in terms
of unconscious drives, so that the whole of conscious life is made
largely subordinate to mans unconscious life. Reason and in-
telligent purpose are under-rated or undercut. Here again, the
Christian can s ee potential good in this step. Since man was
created a character, in part conscious and in part unconscious,
all his life was directed toward God. Responsibility is not merely
on the conscious but on the unconscious level. Mans childhood
is related to his maturity, his subconscious life to his
self-conscious life, and in the whole of his life he is responsible
to God, the absolute personality. The whole of his life needs
therefore to be understood in terms of creation and his status as
an analogical personality. The Christian view of the
subconscious emphasizes responsibility; secular ps ychology
undercuts or negates responsibility with its concept of the
subconscious. In a world of ultimate chance, man cannot be a
responsible being; responsibility and chance cannot co-exist. In
Van Tils incisive words ,
The real reason why modern psychology has left no room for
responsibility is found in the fact that it has taken the whole of the
human personality in all its aspects, self-conscious and subconscious,
and immersed it in an ultimate metaphysical void. Man cannot be
responsible to the void. Hence the only way in which we can establish
human responsibility is by showing the ultimate irrationalism of
all non-theistic thought of which modern psychology is but a
particular manifestation. In that way we place man
self-consciously and subconsciously in every aspect of his person
before the personality of God. Man is responsible in the whole of his
personality but only if he is the creature of God. Man before God is
the only alternative to man in the void.14
Because modern ps ycholog y moves steadily in the direction
of integration into the void, it is not surprising that the fifth step
is the study of abnormal psychology. This again is not without
value, and has thrown light on both normal and abnormal
behavior. But the fact of such study is not as important, as the
reason for it, i.e., the assumption that both normal and
abnormal are both natural and hence normal. It is the denial
of any norm. It is the attitude that led Kinsey to define the six
types of sexual activity as masturbation, spontaneous nocturnal
emissions, petting, heterosexual intercourse, homosexual
contacts
and animal contacts without any distinction between them, all
being natural and equally normal. This is an insistence on
integration into the void, a refusal to face the fact of God and
the fact of sin.
The sixth step into the void is in the study of the s oul of
primitive man, an extens ion backward in the point of time
into the ab yss of irrationality, as V an Til aptly characterizes
it. It involves the creation of a mytholog y and a denial of the
fact of creation in favor of bare vacuity. It is not surprising
then that the seventh and final step is the elevation of animal
ps ychology into a principle of explanation for human
ps ychology. First primitive man and then the animals are used
to push man back into the void. And, if the new ps ychology is
right in its presuppositions, the animal has indeed a certain
priority over man as prior on the historical scene and as the
source of mans biological life. The void thus looms large, and
integration into the void is inevitably the governing principle
which guides the new psychology. Meaning is eroded into
nothingness; relativism rules over truth, and change governs all
things. Religion simply becomes the joyful submission to the
inevitable, a highly philosophical enterpris e to the sophisticate,
but, to the man in the street, merely a sum mons to grin and
bear it.
Man therefore moves into the void progress ively denying the
self-sufficient God and unable to establish his own self-sufficiency.
He rejects biblical miracles because they presuppose the
self-sufficient and sovereign God, and the rejection of miracles
implies the worship of man instead of the worship of God. 15 The
ps ychology of religion is in effect the exposition of another
religion, and false religion is, in general the love of man
instead of the love of God. 16 And the only answer to the sinful
mind of man is revelation.
Since sin is what it is, revelation must be what it is, the insertion
of a new interpretation opposed to the interpretation which the
sinner has given to reality. Hence those who have received this new
revelation must feel certain of the truth of that revelation. They
must regard other religions as false. These other religions will be
in a sense very similar to the true religion. It could not be
otherwise. All men are actually creatures of God. All men fell into
the same sin. All men therefore hate God and are possessed of the
Cain-complex. Hence they will all be alike negatively in the sense
that they try to subordinate the God-idea to other things. They have
all worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.
Even in the midst of those who have been given the true
knowledge of God, we shall expect that the remnants of the
Cain-complex will not be immediately and completely removed.
They will not even be fully removed in any one till after this life.
Therefore, we find the tendency to idolatry and other sins among
Israel. Hence their desire to be in many things like the other nations.
They still dislike the idea of distinctiveness. And positively there
will be a great similarity, too. All men are the creatures of God and
made in the image of God. The form in which they express their
hatred of God will still be similar to the form in which the redeemed
express their love to God. Cain and Abel both go to sacrifice.
According to appearance, they are doing the same thing. In reality,
one was serving God, while the other was serving himself. There
will be, to be sure, a tendency of separation in the course of time
and there will usually be a difference in externals, to some extent,
but yet it remains true that basically it is a matter of the heart.17
In these magnificently telling words of Van Til we understand
the essential religiosity of mans hatred of God: men express their
hatred of God formally in the same or in a like manner to the
expression of love of God by the redeemed. Hence, it is
impossible to accept any and every attempt of man to express
himself religiously as a step towards God; it can be and often is a
manifestation of hostility which outweighs indifference in its
enmity to God.
Man therefore needs saving revelation. His own religious
expression and consciousness cannot be trusted. This saving
revelation is not only in history, culminating in the incarnation
and atonement by Jesus Christ, but in Scripture as well. The
idea of a finished canon is implied in the work of Christ. The
fact revelation had to be fully interpreted by the word
revelation.18 Man does not like the idea of revelation because
he hates the
self-sufficient God. Basic to mans sinful nature, as Van Til so
aptly states it, is not a Freudian wish but the Cainitic wish
that there is no God. He will tolerate only a God in his own
image, one who is co-worker with him and respects mans
sovereignty and ultimacy. As a result, he creates a religion to
conform to his Cainitic wish, and a psychology of religion to
eliminate the objectionable features of religion by appealing to
mans general experience and consciousness as against
revelation. He finds it necessary to argue against regeneration,
because,
It is naturally only a personality that is created that can be
regenerated. Regeneration presupposes passivity. Just as in natural
birth we do not contribute anything, so in spiritual birth we are
passive. But if one begins the whole of his research with the
assumption that personality has somehow of itself crawled out of the
abyss of the void and is wholly a self-accomplishment, it can never
be passive for a moment. Of course, in such a case, mans
personality would not need regeneration, but neither could it be
regenerated. That which has generated itself can also regenerate itself
if we take regeneration in the non-theistic sense of overcoming the
disintegrative forces inherent in reality. On the other hand, that
which has generated itself can never be regenerated if we take
regeneration in the Christian sense. Hence if we wish to discuss the
question of regeneration with the non-Christian interpreters of it,
we should first recognize on both sides that we have differing
conceptions of regeneration. Then we, as Christian theists, should
try to point out that the non-theist conception of regeneration is
impossible. Regeneration would be generation only. And even
generation is impossible, because it is activity in the void. How can
personality step out of the void unless it is at some point passive?
How did an exclusively active personality come into the world
originally in an active way? Any personality wholly active could
never originate. That which has origin is passive. Only that which
is wholly un-originated is wholly active. Now, there is back of that
which is orginated either pure accident or absolute activity.
Non-theism assumes that back of originated personality there is the
blank. So it has chance and passivity back of its conception of
personal activity. This involves the whole position into utter
self-contradiction. Non-theism has to hold to an ultimate fatalism
and an ultimate activism. It
therefore, as we have seen, defines religion as the joyful submission
to the inevitable and at the same time speaks of the infinite
unrealized possibilities before men.
For these reasons, the Christian holds that his conception of God
as absolutely and eternally active with its corollary that man is a
created character, and then, when he becomes a sinner, a recreated
character if the grace of God touches him, is the only interpretation
of experience that does not reduce everything to a meaningless
something.19
As Van Til points out, the issue concerning regeneration is
brought to a focus on the issue of the regeneration of children.
Here the passivity of regeneration is inescapable, and many who
loosely use the term as descriptive of their concept, now part
company from the consistent theist because, however much they
profess to believe that God regenerates man, when confronted
with the regeneration of children, they cannot accept it. In such
an instance, activism is too clearly ruled out; mans role in
regeneration too plainly eliminated and this they cannot tolerate.
No matter how much they have professed to allow God into
the process, it is still for them mans life and mans house, and
God dare not rule; He must only act the part of an invited guest.
For the Christian then, the whole approach of the psychology
of religion is anti-theistic, as is general psychology. For the
Christian, the whole of man was originally created by God and
created good, in his conscious and subconscious life. The whole
of man is now influenced by sin. The whole of man is likewise
affected by regeneration, which, in its conscious expression,
produces conversion. Conversion is not moralism but new life;
its orientation is not social sobriety and good behavior but
rather the will of God. Nothing is gained, as Van Til points out,
in turning publicans into Pharisees, and much can be lost.
Whatever good the psychology of religion may at times
appear to offer to Christianity is to be rejected, because in its
assertion of relativism, and its rejection of the sovereignty of
God, it ultimately denies all that Christianity upholds. At no
point can
any concession be made by the Christian. As Van Til plainly
and succinctly states it, unless we press the crown rights of our
King in every realm we shall not long retain them in any
realm. 20 We either recognize Christ as King in every realm,
and, submitting to Him, gain our created glory, or acting in
terms of the Cainitic wish that there be no God, move steadily
towards integration into the void.
NOTES
I. Cornelius Van Til: Psychology of Religion, p. 3.

s. John Baillie, The Interpretation of Religion, Edinburgh, 1929, p. 15, cited in
Van Til, Psychology of Religion, p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 12.
4. Pratt in Matthews & Smith, A Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, quoted
by Baillie, p. 132.
5. Van Til: Psychology of Religion, p. 18.
6. Ibid., p. 29.
7. Ibid., p. 36.
8. Ibid., p. 42.
9. Ibid., p. 49f.
10. Ibid., p. 53.
II. Ibid., p. 54.
iss. Ibid., p. 57.
13. Ibid., p. 59.
14. Ibid., p. 62.
15. Ibid., p. 105.
16. Ibid., p. 114.
17. Ibid., p. 121.
18. Ibid., p. 124.
19. Ibid., p. 129f.
20. The Defense of the Faith, p. 280.
5.
Ethics and the Chief End of Man
Mans most refined and most popular means of sinning is by

means of morality. Man-centered standards of morality are
created, whereby the varying human requirements for social
order are met, and God is asked to be grateful to man for his
most elementary decency. Moreover, man insists on establishing
his own way of salvation by means of works of morality and
requires that God ratify mans values by making them His own.
Here is the heart of the matter. Is man the source of values
and standards, or is God the source? Can man, as Carnell seems
sometimes to argue, establish laws of logical or moral
contradiction and hold whatever gods may be to meeting
them, or must man meet Gods standards? Indeed, all things are
possible with God, but, if one may speak of an impossible
possibility, it would be this, that God meet mans standards and
conform to mans values. The thought itself is a monstrosity. And
yet, though not so baldly stated, the major drift of ethical
theory is precisely towards requiring that God approve of and
conform to mans moral sense. Man refuses to acknowledge the
taint of his sinful nature and insists that God must behave
according to mans lights, and the fundamental nature of the
universe must be as man would have it to be.
It is for this reason that morality represents mans highest
and most high-handed sin. It is for this reason also that much of
Christian ethical theory and practice represents the most vicious
affront to God and is far more deadly than the sins of the
profligate and erring. It is not enough to say Thou shalt not
commit adultery, and to abstain from committing it. One can
be chaste
81
in order to avoid a messy personal life, in fear of disease, to avoid
extra expense, to avoid the psychological tensions which adultery
produces in our social context, to further ones self-righteous
pretensions to vir tue, to claim s alvation from God, or one can
be chaste to the glory and enjoyment of God. Many of the Ten
Commandments can be duplicated or paralleled in some fashion
in almost ever y human society. But even in their biblical
wording, they are without Christian significance unless taken in
the context of a God-centered faith and life. T hus the only valid
appr oach is precisely that made b y Van T il in his Christian
Theistic Ethics. If morality is not Christian theistic, it is
immoral.
An instance of this non-theistic ethical theory is the following
from a teachers manual, with regard to the Golden Rule:
Explain that this rule represents a great racial achievement
in gr oup living, and that it is not based on the arbitrar y
demands of either a god or a society. 1 To the Christian all such
non-theistic morality is immoral, in that it makes man, the race,
or the group the source of value rather than God. If God be the
source of value, then the heart of all theistic ethical theor y is
clearly stated in the catechism answer, T he chief end of man is
to glorif y God and to enjo y Him forever. M ans summum
bonum, his total and highest good, is the kingdom of God. As
Jesus stated it, Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his
righteousness: and all these things (the values the world prizes)
shall be added unto you. (Matt. 6:33)
For the consistent Christian, then, ethics must be
God-centered. Values and truth do not cons titute a standard
which God and man must alike meet but rather ar e an
expression of the nature of God, and, therefore, of the nature of
Jesus Christ. Accordingly, it becomes impossible to subscribe to
the ethics of Jesus school of thinking. The fallacy of such
thought is that it separates the ethical teaching of Jesus from the
person of Jesus and takes s for gr anted the p agan p os itio n
that tr uth is tr uth in itself and that Jesus only looks up to it. So
also they have taken for granted that goodness is goodness in
itself and does not pro-
2
ceed from the person of Christ as a standard. In all such
thinking, God ceases to be God, and mans conception of
goodness takes precedence over God. True Christian theistic
ethics rests therefore on a specific conception of God and a
specific conception of the nature of Christ.
Thus, in Christian ethical theory, a fundamental
epistemological difference appears. For all other thinking, the
moral consciousness of man is the ultimate source of
information, whereas Christian thought regards it as only the
immediate or proximate source of information on ethical
problems. The sovereign and self-contained God, the
ontological trinity is the ultimate reference point. Unhappily,
too many ostensibly Christian thinkers regard mans moral
consciousness as determinative. As Simone Weil observed,
In a document promulgated by the Pope, one may read, Not only
from the Christian point of view; but, more generally, from the
human point of view . . . as though the Christian point of view
which either has no meaning at all, or else it claims to encompass
everything in this world and the nextpossessed a minor degree
of generality than the human point of view. It is impossible to
conceive a more terrible admission of religious bankruptcy.3
The difference in the two approaches to ethics is seen clearly
in the concept of the good. As Van Til states, for the Christian
the good is good because God says it is good. As such it is
contrasted with non-Christian thought which says that the
good exists in its right and that God strives for this good which
exists in its right.4 Since goodness is an expression of Gods
nature and will, and this nature and will of God is personal,
the good is not something which exists in its own right but is
good because God says so. This fact has great importance for the
doctrine of man. Man was created in the image of God, as a
perfect though finite replica of the Godhead. As such,
therefore, man was created good. The doctrine of the image of
God in man implies and necessitates the original righteousness
of man, unless we begin with a finite God struggling with evil
within Himself and
creating a man in His own dualistic image. But for the Christian
there cannot be any evil in God. The absoluteness of God makes
such a view impossible. According to Scripture, man was created
in the image of God, good, and with an originally righteous
moral consciousness. This original perfection of man was not
metaphysical but ethical, not infinite but finite, and, because
finite, required revelation to live. Man had to be receptively
reconstructive in all his being, because, being derivative, his
goodness could continue only as long as he continued receptive
to the source of his image, his righteousness and his very life.
The non-Christian thinks of mans moral activity as creatively
constructive, and man is therefore not responsible to an
absolute moral personality, while for the Christian,
responsibility is central and his goodness derivative. Because
man has rebelled against God, he has blinded his intellect and
his will by his sin. Having established his own will as
determinative of right and wrong as a consequence of
succumbing to the temptation to be God, man can no longer do
Gods will. Instead, he seeks to establish his own will and his
own concept of the good in terms of his will and his
autonomous consciousness, his claim to be God. As a result, man
cannot know what good is, because he worships the creature
rather than the Creator and reverses all moral standards. He is
totally depraved, i.e., every aspect of his being is infected,
tainted and corrupted by his sin and marked by a radical
perversity towards God. Mans moral consciousness as man is
today cannot be therefore the source of valid information about
the good or anything related thereto, in that man refuses to face
the basic moral question, the absolute sovereignty of God. This
makes the external revelation of Scripture a necessity, and
Scripture alone gives the authoritative answer to all moral
questions or the light in terms of which all moral questions must
be answered. Sin made necessary the external revelation of
Scripture, because mans moral consciousness is now both finite
and sinful. Scripture is still a necessity for the regenerated man,
because regenerated man must still live by revelation and
because his regenerated consciousness is changed in principle
only,
is not perfected and often errs, and hence requires the light of
Scripture. With the light of Scripture, man is able to render the
ethical obedience required of him, the recognition of his
creaturehood and the necessity of thinking Gods thoughts after
Him and acting in terms of Gods revealed will. Redemption
means restoration to the recognition of creaturehood and a
faithful living in terms of it. As Van Til so clearly states it, this
obedience cannot be set against a conception of love as the
higher ethical course, because the conception of love in the
New Testament means, as far as its ethical interpretation is
concerned, nothing but the complete willingness and the internal
desire to be perfectly obedient to God.5
Summing up the whole matter with respect to the epistemological
presuppositions of Christian ethics we may say that the
Christian-theistic conception of an absolute God and an absolute
Christ and an absolute Scripture go hand in hand. We cannot
accept one without accepting the others. It is with the Scriptures as
an absolute and an absolutely comprehensive authority that we
enter upon a discussion of ethical questions as they confront us. We
are fully persuaded that the only logical alternative to this position
is the position of an out and out pragmatism. All halfway positions
eventually lead to either one or the other of the two positions spoken
of, an absolute submission to Scripture and to God or an absolute
rejection of both.6
In its Thomistic conception of the autonomous consciousness
and will of men, Roman Catholicism takes a half-way position.
By emphasizing the intellectual capacity of man apart from
God to know truth correctly, and by approaching the ethical
problem from the standpoint of finite rather than moral
obedience, Thomas Aquinas undermined the absoluteness of
the Christian faith. If mans problem is primarily
metaphysical rather than moral, then mans sin is his
creaturehood, not his rebellion against God. A similar failure
characterizes much Protestant thought.
Van Til tellingly stresses the metaphysical presuppositions of
Christian ethics and their implications. Before there can be
ethics, there must be responsibility. Here a problem comes into
focus. Is man responsible if he is dependent upon his
environment? On the other hand, can man be regarded as
responsible if he is wholly independent? If mans will is wholly
dependent, can ethics exist? Is not man then beyond
accountability and responsibility? Basic to the Christian
approach is the faith that a character can be created as well as
accomplished, as in the case of Adam. Again, basic is the faith
that ethical substitution can be made, and that Christs
substitutionary atonement has altered both the relationship of
believing men to God and their character as well.
These things are understandable only in terms of the
God-concept of Christian ethics. As Van Til points out, the
Christian conception of God is that He is both absolute
rationality and absolute will, so that God does not have to
become good but from all eternity has been good. Thus, in God
there is eternal accomplishment and ultimate self-determination,
absolute freedom. Thus there is no environment for the will of
God, whereas non-Christian thought assumes an environment
for both God and man, an ultimate activism in which God also
must become good or work towards the fulfilment of character.
As a result, as in Plato and modern idealism, the Good rather
than God is the ultimate concept and determinative of both God
and man. God is thus made determined rather than
self-determinative. This absolute goodness requires a
struggling God and man, working to attain goodness; creation is
ultimately impersonal, because goodness is impersonal, and man
flounders from ultimate chance, in some philosophies, to
ultimate necessitarianism or determinism in others. For the
Christian, on the other hand, the ultimate and self-determinative
God is personal and makes possible human responsibility and
ultimate personalism.
Man has been created a character, because man is created as
an analogue of God. Because man is created in the image of God,
he is not a blank morally or intellectually. To deny that man
was created a character is therefore ultimately to deny that God
is the eternal character and self-determinative, because the
image of God cannot be maintained as a valid concept without
this correlation. All mans activity is within the environment
of a created and personal world and an absolute and
self-determinative God, and hence all his activity is against the
background of the plan of God, including his sin. This,
however, does not make God responsible for sin. Man does not
exist in the void but within the framework of Gods creation,
by virtue of which he alone can be considered responsible. The
existence of environment does not negate responsibility; the
created nature of mans character does not destroy mans
responsibility but is the ground of it. It is a false attempt on the
part of some to escape this paradox by speaking of the
self-limitation of God. Van Til succinctly analyzes the fallacy of
such thinking.
It would be self-contradictory for God to limit Himself. It is of His
very essence to be self-determinative. And since He is eternal He
cannot be self-determinative at one time and no longer
self-determinative at another time. The self-limitation of God
sacrifices the self-sufficiency of God. It is this self-sufficiency of
God in which our whole hope for any solution to any problem lies.
The more you break it down the more you work into the hands of
the enemy. And for that reason it is that so far from establishing
freedom for man by reducing this relationship to the plan of God,
you are destroying his freedom and therewith the responsibility of
man by doing so. True freedom for man consists in self-conscious,
analogical activity. If man freely recognizes the fact that back of his
created character lies the eternal character and plan of God, if man
freely recognizes that his every moral act presupposes back of it this
same unlimited God, he will be free indeed. On the other hand, if
man tries to liberate himself from the background of the absolute
plan of God, he has to start his moral activity in a perfect blank,
he has to continue to act as a moral blank, and he has to act in the
direction of a moral blank.7
Moral activity not only presupposes the sovereign and

self-sufficient God but also God as mans highest good. God, and
the glory of God, must be the object of all mans activity and the
purpose of his every act. Not only is mans morality founded on
religion but it must itself be religious activity. Mans morality
thus has as its purpose the glory of God. This purpose he serves,
first, by seeking to establish the kingdom of God, second, by
relying, not on his own will in this task, but on the revealed will
of God in Scripture as his criterion, and, third, by recognizing
that of himself he has no power to work towards the kingdom
of God but must rely on the Holy Spirit, who is the author of
regeneration and faith, which provides his motivation.
Both in religion and morality regenerate man seeks the glory
of God, but in religion directly, and in ethics indirectly. Van Til
analyzes this common purpose and its varied approach most
cogently. He points out that first, in both ethics and religion we
deal with the whole personality of man, which cannot be
departmentalized. Second, both deal with the whole
personality of man in that they seek to make man whole again.
And, as Van Til states, One cannot be a true man unless he be
a Christian. One cannot act as a man unless one acts as a
Christian. Third, both ethics and religion deal with the
whole personality of man in the configuration of the entire
human race, in that neither exists or has meaning apart from
the other. Fourth, both deal with mankind under the aspect of
history or temporality. Man but stultifies himself if he tries to
become eternal. Religious activity as well as ethical activity is
always temporal activity. Romanism virtually denies this and
evangelicalism all too constantly forgets it. Fifth, in both we
deal with historical mankind as genuinely revelatory of God and
as genuinely significant for the development of Gods purpose
with the universe. The end and purpose of the universe is the
glory of God . . . The distinction between religion and ethics
cannot be found ultimately by saying that in religion we seek
God while in ethics we seek something else. We seek God in
everything, if we look at the matter from the most ultimate
point of view. Sixth, both deal with the aspect of the whole
personality known as the will, but with a difference. In Van
Tils terminology, religion sees man not only as king, but as
priest and prophet, not only in his volitional but intellectual
and emotional aspects, while ethics
deals more with man as king, man as actor rather than as thinker
and feeler. Seventh, another difference appears in that mans
volitional activity which ethics deals with is seen under the view
of its immediate results in history, while religion is more
concerned with God above history. In religion, man deals with
God, in ethics with his fellow man.8
To return to mans summinn bonum, the kingdom of God,
Van Til defines it as the realized program of God for man,
which man must adopt as his own ideal and then embark on a
course of action to attain it. Man was created a king and
commissioned to realize his kingship by exercising dominion
and the full implications of the image of God in every field of
activity and life. Man as king is therefore Gods vicegerent in
history. This fact has tremendous implications for man as an
individual and for society.
The ethical ideal for the individualman is self-realization.
Van Til phrases it magnificently.
That the ethical ideal for man should be self-realization follows
from the central place given him in this universe. God made all
things in this universe for Himself, that is, for His own glory. But
not all things can reflect His glory self-consciously. Yet it is
self-conscious glorification that is the highest kind of glorification.
Accordingly, God put all things in this universe into covenant
relation with one another. He made man the head of creation.
Accordingly, the flowers of the field glorified God directly and
unconsciously, but also indirectly and consciously through man.
Man was to gather up into the prism of his self-conscious activity
all the manifold manifestations of the glory of God in order to make
one central self-conscious sacrifice of it all to God.9
Man prepares himself for this great and glorious task by
developing his intellect, his aesthetic capacity, and his every
capacity, as an act of will, by striving to fulfil his calling and his
kingship. He must will to will the will of God for the whole
world. Self realization is the fulfilment of mans kingship.
When man bescomes truly the king of the universe the
kingdom of God is realized and when the kingdom of God is
realized then God is
glorified. Van Til develops more specifically what is involved
in this goal of self-realization. First of all, man must learn to
will the will of God. This means that man must work out his
own will in terms of its created purpose. Mans created purpose
is to serve God as vicegerent, and the more man fulfils his
purpose the more free and spontaneous he becomes. As a result,
Christian morality, in sharp contrast to all legalism, is a growth
in spontaneity. A forced and frustrating moralism is not
Christianity. Second, mans will needs to become increasingly
fixed in its self-determination. This is a development of his
spontaneity. Mans God is absolutely self-determinate; man
will be Godlike in proportion that he becomes self-determining
and self-determinate under God. In proportion that man
develops his self-determination does he develop Gods
determination or plan for his kingdom on earth. God
accomplishes his plans through self-determined characters. An
unstable man would be useless in the kingdom of God. Third,
as man increases in his spontaneity and self-determinateness, his
will must increase in momentum to meet his ever-increasing
responsibility. His growth means a growing enlargement of the
area of his activity which makes necessary a parallel growth in
momentum.10
Self-realization can also be described as a growth in
righteousness, defined by Van Til, in line with Geerhardus
Vos.
Righteousness, when taken as an attribute of God, describes that
aspect of the entire personality of God by which He maintains
within His being and within His created universe that relation of
coordination and subordination which is proper to the station of
each personality. Accordingly, mans righteousness, which ought to
be a reproduction of the righteousness of God, would be, to begin
with, a proper sense of subordination of himself to God and of
coordination of himself with his fellow man. And mans seeking
righteousness would mean (a) that he was becoming increasingly
sensitive to the meaning of these relationships of subordination and
coordination and therefore increasingly spontaneous in his desire
to maintain these relationships, (b) that he was becoming ever
stronger in his determination to see these relationships maintained
and developed and (c) that he therefore would actually increase in
his power to maintain these relationships . . .
Now if we contemplate righteousness as a matter of right relations
among all creatures, and of the right relation of all creatures to their
Creator, it becomes clear that the will of man had a great
comprehensive task to perform. By seeking righteousness, the will of
man was seeking the kingdom of God. Righteousness is the sinews of
the kingdom of God.11
Mans growth in self-realization is, we have seen, his growth

also in spontaneity and freedom. Van Til makes very clear the
full significance of this spontaneity. In God there is no
difference between potentiality and act; that is, God is fully and
perfectly self-conscious, without any unconscious instincts and
drives. Man, as a temporal being, cannot be entirely self-conscious
as God is self-conscious, nor pure act as God is pure act. Before
the fall, however, mans will controlled his subconscious life,
while after the fall mans subconscious life controlled his will.
This is not a metaphysical but a moral change. Fallen man is a
slave to his subconscious rather than master of it. But, as
regenerate man grows in self-realization, he grows first, in his
control of his subconscious, in the spontaneity of his reactions,
and in his self-consciousness. Second, there is not only increase
in the swiftness of his spontaneity, but also an increase in
stability. Third, parallel to this is a growth of momentum in
doing the will of God.
Not only is it mans task to seek the kingdom of God but also
the task of society as a whole, an ideal and task set before man
in paradise. The covenant responsibility makes clear that the
self-realization of the individual is the advantage of all and is
furthered by and dependent upon the realization of others. The
pagan conception of self-realization involves the sacrifice of
others and is at their expense. The Christian conception of
self-realization is in terms of the kingdom of God and a common
humanity, an organism. The conception of the church as a body
stresses the fact that individuality is not monotonous repetition;
we are not all identical organs, eyes or ears, but each a separate
individual and yet part of a common whole. We serve that whole
by developing our own individuality, which thereby develops
the whole and enables others to develop their own
individualities.
Health and prosperity are legitimate parts of this ideal. The
Christian ethics is not ascetic, nor is, as Van Til emphasizes, the
body to be regarded as ethically lower than the soul. A sound
mind in a sound body is a true kingdom goal. 12 It is paganism
to hold to evil as inherent in matter.
Self realization is productive of happiness, in that a realized
self is a happy self, and, at the same time, only a happy self is
a completely realized self. Even as bodily exercise leads to
health, so growth in righteousness creates growth in happiness.
In the kingdom of God, there is no disharmony between that
which is righteous, that which is useful, and that which makes
for happiness.
When we turn to non-Christian thought, we find that all the
various systems have in common a conception of existence as it
is today as being normal. There is a denial of the biblical
concept of original righteousness, of created character, and of
the fall. There is a denial also of any ethical ideal given by a
self-sufficient God by means of which all systems of ethics must
be judged. Behind this denial lies a radical hostility to God.
According to Van Til,
The real meaning of this opposition to the original perfect ethical
ideal is nothing short of hatred of the living God. If God does exist
as mans Creator, we have seen, it is impossible that evil should be
inherent in the temporal universe. If God exists, man himself must
have brought in sin by an act of wilful transgression. Hence
existence, as it now is, is not normal, but abnormal. Accordingly, to
maintain that existence, as it now is, is normal, is tantamount to a
denial of mans responsibility for sin and this in turn makes God
responsible for sin, and this simply means that there is no absolute
God.13
For the Christian, however, man is today a broken
personality, in that the various aspects of his being are no
longer in
right relationship one to another because he is not in right
relationship to God. He may, for example, be given to a
one-sided intellectualism or to a one-sided voluntarism; in any
and all such cases, the one-sidedness is a consequence of sin.
Man was created in perfect harmony with himself because
he was created in perfect harmony with God. Hence Christian
ethics can never be one-sidedly intellectualistic or one-sidedly
voluntaristic. We do not say that as Christians we are not often
one-sided. As a matter of fact no one escapes being one-sided
to some extent. But we confess that this one-sidedness is sin
before God. And we hold that harmony between the various
aspects of human personality can be obtained on no other than
the Christian basis.14 Basic to Christian faith is, first, the
assumption that man was created a whole personality, and that
man can again become a whole personality only through
Christian faith and maturity. Second, another basic
presupposition is the doctrine of creation, whereby mankind is a
common whole and bound by a common ethical ideal as given
by the Creator. All non-Christian thought, in denying the
doctrine of creation, denies itself thereby a universalism of
meaning and a unity of interpretation. Third, it follows therefore
that men in all places and ages must be thought of as a family,
and ethics cannot be, as non-Christian ethics is, individualistic.
Individualistic ethics falls between two extremes. It sacrifices, as
in Plato, most individuals to a small number deemed worthy of
the sacrifice, without any organic conception of the nation or
the race. Statism is, as Van Til clearly sees, individualism of
the worst sort; the mass of humanity is regarded as manure for
the welfare of the ruling class. Modern individualistic ethics
often goes to the other extreme and regards society as an
aggregate of individuals and dissipates all authority. When the
right of the individual as against the right of society is
emphasized, authority disappears. In Van Tils words,
Consequently there is no proper sense of the necessity of authority.
Authority has largely disappeared from the family. The autocracy
of the father, as it often existed in the perverted individualism of
old, has been replaced by the autocracy of the child in the perverted
individualism of today. The autocracy of king which did not
recognize the rights of the subjects has been replaced with a false
democracy which seeks the ultimate source of authority in the
multitude of men without recognition of God.15
Non-Christian thought, lacking the biblical concept of creation
and original righteousness, assumes a natural conflict between
society and the individual. It assumes that the individual cannot
develop except at the expense of other individuals and society,
and, vice versa, that society cannot develop except at the
expense of the individual. Thus, life becomes a warfare, and
ethics becomes either individualistic or compromising.
Aristotles answer was the doctrine of the mean, of the
middle-of-the-roader as the virtuous man. This is virtually a
denial of the ideal of moral perfection and assumes that virtue
is merely keeping a balance between two evils. The Christian,
on the other hand, is in virtue of his justification and
regeneration, in principle perfect, though not in this life in
degree perfect. The principle of his life is the perfection of Jesus
Christ, not the negative effort of keeping balance between evils.
The absolute ideal is maintained throughout Scripture,
although the absolute summum bonum will never be reached on
earth. The original righteousness of man and his creation in the
image of God make it reasonable to expect that the absolute
ideal will be gained and is the proper goal of historical activity.
The biblical promise is that complete happiness will come to
the perfect, whereas the penalty for disobedience is death. The
goal of history is thus perfection, and its realization, the
kingdom of God, is portrayed in Revelation as paradise
regained, a life in which natural and moral evil are destroyed.
Natural and moral evil are closely allied in Scripture, not, in
pagan terms, as resulting one from the other, natural evil as a
result of moral evil, but rather both alike a result of the fall and
mans alienation from God.
With the regenerate, the kingdom of God is not only an
objective and a hope but a present possession as a gift of God.
The perfection they strive for is theirs in principle now, by
virtue of
the substitutionary role of Jesus Christ. Thus, as John states,
the Christian in principle cannot sin although he is in degree
a sinner and cannot deny his sin without being a liar. Thus
while man must strive for the kingdom, he must also recognize
that it is the gift of God and his very striving an act and
manifestation of grace.
Not only is mans task the positive one of asserting and
extending the dominion rights of the kingdom, but also the
negative one of destroying the works of the evil one. As Van
Til states, the regenerate see evil as an insult to God. Not only
must evil be destroyed everywhere, but its consequences also,
while, on the other hand, there is the positive requirement to do
good to all men, especially those of the household of faith. Evil
must be destroyed in the world at large, and in ourselves, and
God is ready to use the heathen as a scourge against His own in
order to cleanse them, so seriously does He regard evil in His
people. The Christian must not surrender to the pessimism of
unbelieving realism or to the shallow optimism of
uncomprehending perfectionism.
A particular point is that of the Christians attitude toward the

abolition of war. Some would hold that since the Bible tells us that
there will be wars till the end of time, it would be flying in the face
of providence if we should try to outlaw war. But there is a difference
between a commandment of God and a statement of what will come
to pass. God commands us to be perfect but tells us that none of us
will ever be perfect in this life. So it is our plain task to do what
we can, in legitimate ways, to lessen the number of wars and to make
them less gruesome.
A great deal of our time will have to be taken up with the
destruction of evil. We may not even seem to see much progress in
ourselves or round about us, during our lifetime. We shall have
to build with the trowel in one hand and the sword in the other.
It may seem to us to be a hopeless task of sweeping the ocean dry.
Yet we know that this is exactly what our ethical ideal would be if
we were not Christians. We know that for non-Christians their
ethical
ideal can never be realized either for themselves or for society. They
do not even know the true ethical ideal. And as to our own efforts
we know that though much of our time may have to be taken up
with pumping out the water of sin, we are nevertheless laying the
foundation of our bridge on solid rock, and we are making progress
toward our goal. Our victory is certain. The devil and all his servants
will be put out of the habitable universe of God. There will be a
new heaven and a new earth on which righteousness will dwell.16
Because of this foundation, true Christian faith has an ethics of
hope and involves not only striving but possessing. The
absolute ideal is presented in severity, as the Old Testament
itself witnesses, and such concessions as that era witnessed did
not compromise the absoluteness of the ideal or its severity. Such
concessions as the Old Testament evidences are made, not in
terms of the ultimate goal but in terms of more immediate goals
which are in themselves stepping stones to the ideal. The
absoluteness of the goal is more openly set forth in the New
Testament by means of the example of Jesus Christ. In order to
understand the full meaning of his example, it is necessary to
believe that origin does affect validity, that a Christ coming from
the background of the self-contained God and ontological trinity
is different from one born out of an evolutionary process and a
background in which evil is as basic as the good. First, therefore,
creation must be presupposed in all its implications. If the
perfect man Jesus is to be of any service to us, the constitution
of the universe must be such that perfection is a concept that has
cosmic significance.17 Second, to be valid, the example of Jesus
presupposes the fall. This, means that, because we were created
righteous, we have an obligation to be perfect and are responsible
for our present evil estate. We must either be like Jesus or be
condemned by him. He comes as Savior or is met as Judge.
Third, the example of Jesus, in the true Christian sense,
presupposes his substitutionary atonement; the required
perfection is made a gift by God and is mans in principle on
regeneration. Our imitation of Christ must be properly
conceived as an imi-
tation of God, a union with Him. But this union can never be
conceived of in mystical or metaphysical terms; it is a union of
life, not of substance, ethical, not essential. It is typified in
Scripture as marriage; true marriage is true union, not of
substance but of life; the man does not cease to be man, nor the
woman a woman, but each fulfils himself in terms of sex and
life and becomes more himself or herself while more truly one.
Thus man becomes more fully man as he becomes more truly one
with Christ. Christ as our example is thus primarily Christ as
our Mediator and Redeemer. And Christ as our King means
that the Kingship of Christ must be carried out in every sphere
of life. For the church to limit herself to soul-saving is to deny
His Kingship over all creation and to limit the crown-rights of
King Jesus. As Van Til points out, evangelical churches have too
commonly fallen into an anti-biblical individualism in their
exclusive concern with soul-saving, while modernism, in
abandoning the substitutionary atonement, has returned to the
righteousness of the Pharisees and seeks to establish the kingdom
by mans effort and mans righteousness and is consequently
man-centered in its conception of the kingdom. The whole end
and purpose of history lies, acccording to Christian theism, not
in history itself, but beyond history, in the God of history. This
God of history has set the kingdom of God as the climax of
history.18
The revealed will of God must therefore be mans
ethical standard. The moral consciousness of man as it is today
only corroborates the idea of the fall of man. It assumes its
authority and autonomy and denies that God is Creator. It
denies therefore external revelation, since it cannot credit
external authority. Christian theism, because of its
transcendent God, can allow for external as well as internal
revelation, while non-theistic thought, because of its denial of
the transcendence of God can, in the nature of the case, allow for
no external standard at all. Non-Christian thought must, by
virtue of its presuppositions, maintain that all external
revelations are based upon delusion . . . The rationale of mans
moral action must be found
in something beyond himself . . . In the nature of the case the
external must always be prior to the internal.19 Unless this
external and divine ethical standard be maintained, there is
moral anarchy. Without the God of Scripture, there is only
ethical advice, no authority. There is no alternative but that of
theonomy and autonomy. It is vain to attempt to flee from
God and flee to a universe in order to seek eternal laws
there.20
The external, absolute standard of the self-sufficient God is
therefore the only valid one. While naturalistic ethics trusts the
immediate deliverances of mans moral consciousness,
Christianity holds to the principle of mediacy, in that mans
moral consciousness is not expected to function autonomously
but is correlative to supernatural positive revelation, and, by the
Holy Spirit, is led to increasing trust on that standard and
activity in terms of that faith.
Such, in brief, is Van Tils conception of Christian theistic
ethics. His study, which contains some of his most brilliant
writing, is an eloquent answer to those who complain that Van
Til is too difficult to understand. The difficulty most people
experience is not with Van Tils writing but with his God; it is
essentally He whom they find inacceptable and offensive.
Their quarrel is not with what they cannot understand in Van
Til but with that which they all too clearly understand.
NOTES
1. Jo Hindman, The Fight for your Childs Mind, The American Mercury,
Vol. LXXXV, No. 406, Nov., 1957, p. 9.
2. Van Til: Christian Theistic Ethics, 1957, p. 9.
3. Simone Weil: The Need for Roots. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952, p. 127.
4. Van Til, op. cit., p. l9.
5. Ibid., p. 26.
6. Ibid., p. 27.
7. Ibid., p. 35.
8. Ibid., p. 39f.
g. Ibid., p. 41.
10. Ibid., pp. 41, 42.
11. Ibid., p. 43f.
12. Ibid., p. 50.
13. Ibid., p. 56.
14. Ibid., p. 6of.
15. Ibid., p. 62.
16. Ibid., p. 80.
17. Ibid., p. 97.
18. Ibid., p. 112.
19. Ibid., pp. 116, 118.
go. Ibid., p. 121.
6.
Apologetics and Se If-Consciousness
Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of

life against the various forms of the non-Christian philosophy
of life.1 In the Princeton tradition apologetics was called upon
to establish the truth of Christianity as against the claims of
unbelief. Abraham Kuyper, however, challenged this traditional
approach as faulty Calvinism in that it assumes that the natural
man has the ability to reason his way to salvation, and that the
presuppositions of the natural man can lead to God. Van Tils
development of this Amsterdam tradition is regarded by many
as his greatest contribution to the Reformed faith. This involves
the presupposition of the whole of Scripture and the Christian
faith as true. Instead of trying to prove the truth of Christianity
to the unregenerate, it assumes its truth at the outset and then
challenges the natural man by demonstrating that on his
presuppositions nothing is true, nothing can be accounted for,
and his own thinking is invalid. Van Til thus consistently
demonstrates that the natural man dares not be true to his own
thinking but must use Christian presuppositions much of the
time in order to make science, philosophy and thought possible.
He demonstrates that the Scholastic and Arminian are
inconsistent thinkers and either unwilling to follow Christian
faith consistently or ignorant of the nature of their logic. Van
Tils apologetics can be clearly seen in The Defense of the Faifh
and The New Modernism. In the latter work we have a thorough
analysis of the theology of Barth and Brunner, demonstrating
that their attempt to overcome their presuppositions and
consciousness theology and reach an absolutely other God is
no more than a
sky-rocket attempt, beginning and ending on earth, even as their
God begins and ends in the human consciousness and is more
subjective than subjectivism. In the former, the presuppositions
of Cecil De Boer, Jesse De Boer, Orlebeke, Van Halsema, Daane
and Masselink are shown to be inconsistent with their proposed
Reformed faith. Van Tils apologetics operates then on the
practical principle that the best defense is a good offense. But
the matter goes deeper than that. His apologetics cuts through
the delusions and pretenses of men and lays bare their
presuppositions. It operates on the fundamental faith that
unless we presuppose the whole of Christianity we can logically
and consistently know nothing, that we either begin with the
self-contained God and His eternal decree as mans ultimate
environment, as derived from Scripture, or we assume that
chance is ultimate, in which case man can know nothing unless
he knows everything. And to know everything is especially an
impossibility in an evolving universe in which potentiality and
possibility are unlimited.
Van Tils apologetics, like his preaching, and indeed like all
true preaching, has a clear-cut purpose, to make both Christians
and non-Christians epistemologically self-conscious, to reveal to
both the nature of their presuppositions and their
inconsistencies, and to bring them to a clearer responsibility of
their position as covenant-keepers or covenant-breakers. It is
impossible to appreciate Van Tils success in this task without
taking note of the anguished and bitter opposition he has
aroused. Self-consciousness is a painful business for man, who
age after age has sought to lull himself to sleep with the opium
of religion, economics, politics, and business, and sought
frantic flight into a hundred and one activities and refuges. Man
resents his self-consciousness, because fundamental to it is an
inescapable God-consciousness which he seeks to suppress. He
seeks to establish himself as autonomous, but not only all
creation but every fibre of his being and instant of
self-consciousness thunders out his irrepressible
God-consciousness. He builds up an elaborate system of
pretense, hoping that if he pretends long enough that
God does not exist, He will disappear! The inconsistent
Christian tries to satisfy both God and man, hoping to escape
the tension of decision or the conflict of enlistment by
satisfying both God and the natural man. But Van Tils
methodology militates against all this. It requires an
examination of presuppositions and a consistency in terms of
them. It calls on men to be epistemologically self-conscious.
Thus, fundamental to Van Tils apologetics is the principle
that for man self-consciousness presupposes God-consciousness.
Calvin speaks of this as mans inescapable sense of deity. The
doctrine of creation, and especially creation in the image of
God, make this God-consciousness an inescapable fact. But not
only is man a creature, he is also created as an historical being,
which involves the conception of the covenant. He has an
historical responsibility and task of reinterpreting the counsel
of God as expressed in creation to himself individually and
collectively. Mans creature-consciousness may therefore be
more particularly signalized as covenant-consciousness. Basic to
this task was the dependence upon God, his work being
analogical, and hence, since natural revelation is itself
incomplete, from the beginning the very idea of supernatural
revelation is correlatively embodied in the idea of mans proper
self-consciousness.2 Man therefore knows himself to be a
covenant-breaker, knows that, instead of managing himself and
all things to the glory of God, he seeks to manage all things,
including himself, to his own glory. Van Til wastes no time
trying to prove God. On the contrary, he demonstrates, by his
incisive analysis of rival philosophies, that to argue consistently
that He is not is to destroy all science and philosophy and render
all things meaningless. As he states it,
The truly biblical view ... applies atomic power and flamethrowers
to the very presupposition of the natural mans ideas with respect
to himself. It does not fear to lose a point of contact by uprooting the
weeds rather than by cutting them off at the very surface. It is
assured of a point of contact in the fact that every man is made in
the image of God and has impressed upon him the law of God. In
that fact alone he may rest secure with respect to the point of
contact problem. For that fact makes men always accessible to
God. That fact assures us that every man, to be a man at all, must
already be in contact with the truth. He is so much in contact
with the truth that much of his energy is spent in the vain effort
to hide this fact from himself. His efforts to hide this fact from
himself are bound to be self-frustrative.
Only by thus finding the point of contact in mans sense of deity
that lies underneath his own conception of self-consciousness as
ultimate can we be both true to Scripture and effective in reasoning
with the natural man.3
All created reality is revelational in character; its revelation
of God is unavoidable and inescapable. But the natural man
seeks to suppress this witness as well as that of his own nature.
As a result, the only point of contact he tolerates is one which
concedes his claim to autonomy. The only way the Christian
can deal with this stubborn and wilful blindness is by head-on
collision, by an all-out challenge to the natural man. He must
reason by presupposition, and the ontological trinity, as taught in
the Scriptures, is the presupposition of all human predication.
All reasoning is by presupposition, but too little reasoning is
consistently and self-consciously presuppositional. Some years
ago, a Western trader found his work vastly enhanced by his
half-white, half-Indian status. Among the Indians, he naturally
and easily spoke his mothers tongue, acted as one of them, and
reasoned in terms of their culture and faith. Among the white
miners and ranchers, he readily fell into his fathers ways, his
fathers skepticism of Indian myth, and the white mans sense of
superiority. Although often accused of hypocrisy, a sin not
uncommon among such mixed bloods and a source of
advantage to them, this was not entirely true in his case. He
shared in both outlooks and lived in unresolved tension and
frustration. In a sense, this is the position of the natural man
today. A creature, created in Gods image, his entire being is
revelational of God. To think coherently, he must presuppose
God. In order to have science, he must begin with Christian
assumptions and presup-
pose the unity of science and of knowledge. But, being fallen, he
now presupposes his autonomy and attempts to suppress,
wherever he becomes conscious of its implications, this basic
presupposition of God. As a result, his thinking is inconsistent,
reveals his tension and frustration, and lacks an epistemological
self-consciousness. To live consistently in terms of his
autonomy would plunge him into the shoreless and bottomless
ocean of relativity, but to live and think consistently in terms of
the self-contained God would involve a total surrender to His
sovereignty. The natural man tries, as indeed too many
regenerate men do also, to live in terms of both presuppositions,
to have a foot in both camps and have the advantages offered by
both God and Satan, but the results of this conscious and
subconscious effort is tension and frustration. Van Tils
apologetics seeks to bring out this epistemological
self-consciousness in both the regenerate and unregenerate and
to make both aware of the nature of their reasoning. It involves
a recognition of the true nature of reasoning. As Van Til
observes, To admit ones own presuppositions and to point
out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that
all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning.
The starting point, the method and the conclusion are always
involved in one another.4 Van Til summarizes the issue at stake
very clearly:
Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely extended
and bottomless ocean of water. Desiring to get out of water, he makes
a ladder of water. He sets this ladder upon the water and against the
water and then attempts to climb out of the water. So hopeless and
senseless a picture must be drawn of the natural mans methodology
based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate.
On his assumption his own rationality is a product of chance. On
his assumption even the laws of logic which he employs are products
of chance. The rationality and purpose that he may be searching for
are still bound to be products of chance . . . Christian theism, which
was first rejected because of its supposed authoritarian character,
is the only position which gives human reason a field for successful
operation and a method of true progress in knowledge.5
Non-Christians are able to discover truth only because they are
never able and therefore never do employ their own methods
consistently. A. E. Taylor has admitted that the concept of the
uniformity of nature, so fundamental to science, cannot be
proven except on evidence which presupposes this very
principle. The Christian should begin his thinking consciously
committed to reasoning systematically on the presupposition of
the ontological trinity, the self-contained God whose infallibly
inspired final revelation to man is Scripture. No piecemeal
assumption of Christian theism is possible: the whole must
be presupposed, and the whole must be shown to be the only
presupposition which makes for rationality and gives the
possibility of consistent knowledge. A truly Protestant method
of reasoning involves a stress upon the fact that the meaning of
every aspect or part of Christian theism depends upon Christian
theism as a unit.6
Christian apologetics has its principle of discontinuity in the
doctrine of creation, and its principle of continuity in the
self-contained God and His plan for history. It has a concept of
the unity of truth, whereas the natural man, like Eve,
separates truth and reality. Eve, in succumbing to Satans
temptation, succumbed to the opinion that no assertion in
terms of a rational scheme could predict the course of
movement of time-controlled reality. Reality, Satan practically
urged upon man, was to be conceived of as something that is
not under rational control. Every non-Christian philosophy
makes the assumption made by Adam and Eve and is therefore
irrationalistic. 7 The result is that non-Christian methodology is
atomistic and conceives of system only as a limiting notion and
an ideal, not as a reality. The natural man knows what he knows
on the basis of principles to which he denies all validity and
reality, while professing principles on the basis of which he can
know nothing. His is indeed a St. Vitus dance in no mans land.
As a result, he denies any authority except that which is
agreeable to his presupposition of autonomy. His concept of
authority is therefore basically the idea of the expert,
adhered to in various forms. In virtually denying G ods
eternal decree as being mans ultimate environment, the
natural man destroys himself in that he makes chance
ultimate. Chance is simply the metaphysical correlative of
the idea of the autonomous man. When man seeks to
dethrone God, he dethrones himself as vicegerent; when
man doubts the counsel of G od he destroys the foundation
of his own reasoning; when man questions Gods
predestination, he denies the ground of his freedom. But
the natural man takes the deadly course.
The autonomous man will not allow that reality is already
structural in nature by virtue of the structural activity of
Gods eternal plan. But if reality is non-structural in nature
then man is the one who for the first time, and therefore in an
absolutely original fashion, is supposed to bring structure
into reality. But such a structure can be only for him. For,
in the nature of the case, man cannot himself as a finite and
therefore temporally conditioned being, control the whole of
reality. But all this amounts only to saying that modern
philosophy is quite consistent with its own principles when it
contends that in all that man knows he gives as well as takes. It
is merely the non-rational that is given to him; he himself
rationalizes it for the first time. And so that which appears to
him as rationally related reality is so related primarily because
he himself has rationalized it. 8
The p urpose t hen of Van Tils apologetics and
preaching, as it should be of all truly Christian thought, is
to bring about this epistemological self-consciousness in
men, to recall the regenerate to their presuppositions, and
to force the natural man to recognize the meaning of his
position, to tear the mask off the sinners face and
compel him to look at himself and the world for what they
really are. 9 Men dislike this epistemological
self-consciousness; they prefer to disguise their Cainitic
wish that there b e no G od in a mass of rationalizations.
They prefer to live in t he gr ey world of evasion and
irresolution. For them it is a disservice to be summoned to
honesty and consistency. But the summons mus t b e made.
And V an Til has made it.
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: Apologetics, p. 1.

Ibid., p. 55.
3. Ibid., p. 58.
4. C. Van Til: The Defense of the Faith, p. 118.
5. Ibid., p. 119.
6. Ibid., p. 132.
7. Ibid., p. 135.
8. Ibid., p. 157f.
9. Ibid., p. 166.
7.
The Issue in Common Grace
A central fallacy in contemporary Calvinist thinking comes to

focus in the common grace issue. The problem, however, is not new,
and the outcome historically has been monotonously similar. It was an
issue in the New England theology, where the expression the Grace
of Nature, or some Remainder of the natural Image of God, left in
man after his fall, was used.1 The orthodox party pushed the
conception of sin to great extremes in order to preserve the
sovereignty of God, while others, trying to do justice to the realities
of the human situation, moved steadily into Unitarianism. In
England there was also a notable drift from Calvinism into
Unitarianism, a correlation so often noted that some scholars have
futilely attempted to find elements of Socinianism in Calvin to
account for it.2
If the answer is not to be found in Calvin, what then is it in
Calvinism that creates this recurrent problem, and a gateway to heresy
and false orthodoxy, whenever the question of the restraint of sin in
the ungodly and their performance of works of civic righteousness
comes up? Why, when Calvinists begin by accepting the sovereignty of
God, do they then founder on the question of the natural mans
manifestations of goodness? And why is this particular problem a
signal, historically, of the imminent break-up of the Calvinism at hand?
The ostensibly orthodox Calvinists won the argument in New England,
but they did not live to celebrate it. They were destroyed by the
nature of their victory.
To understand this issue and its gravity, let us examine the
controversy as it has developed within the Christian Reformed
108
Church in A merica. H ere the struggle came to focus in
the works of H erman Hoeksema. To Hoeksema, the
growing interest in common grace sp elled death for
Calvinis m. As he viewed it,
This broad-minded party, it must be recorded, did not
appear to have any sympathy with the views of Doctor
Abraham Kuyper ST., until they discovered that his theory of
Common Grace offered them a philosophy that would
support their latitudinarian views in the name of Calvinism.
The antithetical conception of Kuyper they fairly disdained.
Common grace became the warp and the woof of their
life-view. Calvinism and Common Grace became synonyms.
Only they that believed and emphasized the theory of common
grace were the true Calvinists. And all that opposed them and
refused to believe and proclaim this theory of common grace,
they proudly and disdainfully branded as Anabaptists! By a
dexterous hocus-pocus, Calvinism, always known the world
over for its doctrine of predestination and particular grace, had
been changed overnight into a philosophy of common grace!
Those who made this discovery and propagated this conception
of Calvinism were, generally speaking, the men of Religion
and Culture, which was the name of a magazine they
published and in which propaganda was made for the
broader views. 3
Hoeksema thus clearly believed that the Reformed faith
was at stake, and only by a denial of common grace and any
so-called civic right eousness on the part of t he natural
man could that faith be maintained. The decision, however,
went against Hoeks ema in the Synod action of 1924, and
the Three Points on common grace were formulated by
that body. The Three Points asserted, first, that God has a
favorable attitude towards mankind in general, s econd, that
there is a restraint of sin in the life of the individual and
in society, and third, that touching the performance of
so-called civic righteousness by the unregenerate, the Synod
declares that according to Scripture and the Confession the
unregenerate, though incapable of any saving good, can
perform such civic good. 4
The contr overs y, h o wev er, did not end with t he
exodus of
Hoeksema and the formation of the Protestant Reformed
Church nor was it limited to the writings of Hoeksema. The
telling analysis of the controversy as made by Van Til brought
the issue again to the forefront. Van Til subscribed fully to the
Three Points, but the attack was launched with fury by some
of those who subscribed to common grace. Why the virulence
of this attack when Van Til wrote as a champion of common
grace?
No attempt will be made here to go into the details of the
controversy, nor to give a summary of Van Tils thought. His
thinking on the subject can be found not only in his book
Common Grace (1947) but his subsequent pamphlets, A Letter
on Common Grace, Particularism and Common Grace, and
Common Grace and Witness-Bearing, and in his many syllabi.
Our attempt will be rather to analyze the basic presuppositions
of both parties in terms of Van Tils basic presupposition as
well as his developed philosophy.
We do, in a sense, deal with the issue in considering the
problem of inspiration and dictation, as well as the meaning of
inspiration. Can God and man both act, or does the free activity
of the one eliminate the possibility of the free activity of the
other? If men are predestined to damnation, can they act
freely and can they perform works of civic righteousness? Or,
on the other hand, if the unregenerate perform works of civic
righteousness and act with apparent freedom, can we speak of
an election to reprobation?
Historically, the problem has been answered in two ways, and
both answers have foundered Calvinism. Men have felt that
the only way to answer the problem is either to obliterate God
or man, or, at the very least, seriously to limit them, beyond the
scope of Scripture. This is Hoeksemas dilemma. He is
desperately concerned with retaining the Reformed faith and
asserting the sovereignty of God. Predestination is therefore
for him rightly a hallmark of faith, and an evidence of sound
theology. But his conception of predestination is mechanical and
external. Gods predestination and providence, His decree, do
not operate
By What Standard? Il l
simultaneously and coextensively with mans whole life and
being, but externally. In a commencement address delivered on
June 9, 1953, on Mans Freedom and Responsibility,
Hoeksema stated:
The real and Scriptural conception of the relation between mans
freedom, on the one hand, and the sovereign counsel of God on the
other hand is this, that the freedom and the responsibility of man are
hemmed in from every side by the counsel of God. Have before
your mind a circle, representing the counsel of God. In that counsel
of God stands the morally free and responsible creature that is called
man; and that counsel of God hems him in on every side.5
Again, Hoeksema clearly stated, I always say, beloved: Give

me God, if I must make a choice. If I must make a choice to lose
God or man, give me God. Let me lose man. Its all right to me:
no danger there. Give me God! Thats Reformed! And thats
especially Protestant Reformed!6 Noble as this may sound, it
is clearly unsound and unscriptural, definitely not Reformed.
Scripture does full justice to God and to man; it never loses
man nor eliminates him. Hoeksemas stand, far from being a
defense of the faith, is once again its death-knell. Only biblical
thought can survive, and only biblical thought is realistic.
Here we see clearly the recurring problem of defective
Calvinism. It believes that God alone can act freely; for man to
act freely is to limit God. Because it has no understanding of the
analogical nature of mans thinking and activity, nor of the
nature of the divine decree, it insists on thinking univocally,
and all thinking, human and divine, and all activity, is
conceived of as creative. Thus man is made a rival to God in a
very real sense, and a life and death struggle ensues, in which
one must obliterate the other. In Scripture, mans ethical
rebellion and attempt to be as God does not constitute an actual
metaphysical rivalry nor does it constitute an actual rivalry
with God but falls within His decree and providence.
However limited the scope and argument of either party, the
logic inherent in either position leads to the obliteration of God
or man.
Thus to argue with Hoeksema on the one hand, or with
Daane and Masselink on the other,7 in terms of their ideas is to
be involved in their folly; one must challenge their
presuppositions.
This Van Til does. He calls attention, in answering Masselink,
to the confusion between the metaphysical and ethical aspects of
mans being and the metaphysical and ethical approaches to the
common grace question. He challenges the false bifurcation
between human activity and divine activity as two water-tight
compartments, and points out clearly that all created activity
is revelational of God. Without thus making all created reality
revelational of God the ethical reaction of man would take
place in a vacuum.8 If man could press one button on the radio
of his experience and not hear the voice of God then he would
always press that button and not the others. But man cannot
even press the button of his own self-consciousness without
hearing the requirements of God.9 The answer is not to be found
in any attempt to obliterate or limit either God or man, but in
biblical realism, which recognizes the creative activity of God
and presupposes the divine decree as the ground for mans every
activity, including his spontaneity and freedom. On any other
basis, man and God are made rivals as ultimates and placed in
metaphysical conflict. As Van Til puts it, Either presuppose
God and live, or presuppose yourself as ultimate and die. That is
the alternative with which the Christian must challenge his
fellow man. This constitutes the one proof of God, the proof
which argues that unless this God, the God of the Bible, the
ultimate being, the Creator, the controller of the universe, be
presupposed as the foundation of human experience, this
experience operates in a void. This one proof is absolutely
convincing.10
With this approach, Van Til has done justice to biblical
thinking, has upheld Gods sovereignty and the integrity of
human experience, and has established common grace within
the context of the divine decree. But this latter is precisely his
offense.
Common Grace has again become an instrument whereby man
can enter a heretical toe into the Calvinist door. In the name
of common grace, Gods sovereignty is limited by insisting that
common grace is not to be understood in terms of the divine
decree and within the framework of predestination but as an
area of freedom beyond God and outside the scope of His decree.
It is construed therefore as an area of autonomy for man. Van
Til has argued directly against this, and emphasized its danger
in his debate with Masselink, who has attempted to use the
concept of common grace to create neutral ground between the
regenerate and unregerenate and thereby establish a philosophy
of science.
I argued that on the basis of such an apologetics as Old Princeton
furnished us we were still on an essentially Romanist rather than
on a Reformed basis. For it is of the essence of Romanism to argue
with the non-believer on the ground of a supposedly neutral
position. No reformed person could espouse such a position and
then honestly claim that his position was uniquely Calvinistic and
as such calculated to save science.
In this context I contended that a doctrine of common grace that
is constructed so as to appeal once more to a neutral territory
between believers and non-believers is, precisely like Old Princeton
apologetics, in line with a Romanist type of natural theology. Why
should we then pretend to have anything unique? And why then
should we pretend to have a sound basis for science? Nothing short
of the Calvinistic doctrine of the all-controlling providence of God,
and the indelibly revelational character of every fact of the created
universe, can furnish a true foundation for science. And how can
we pretend to be able to make good use of the results of the scientific
efforts of non-Christian scientists, if, standing on an essentially
Romanist basis, we cannot even make good use of our own efforts?
Why live in a dream world, deceiving ourselves and making false
pretenses before the world? The non-Christian view of science:
(a) presupposes the autonomy of man
(b) presupposes the non-created character, ie., the chance-con-
trolled character, of facts; and,
(c) presupposes that laws rest not in God but somewhere in the
universe.
Now if we develop a doctrine of common grace in line with the
teachings of Hepp with respect to the general testimony of the Spirit
then we are incorporating into our scientific edifice the very forces
of destruction against which that testimony is bound to go forth.11
The concept of neutral ground assumes an area of creation
which is outside the government of God and can be interpreted
without Him and apart from Him. For the consistently Christian
thinker, there can be no possibility apart from God, who is not
surrounded by, but is the source of possibility.12 Whenever
and wherever an area of possibility apart from God is posited,
and an area of brute factuality and chance, and this area
accordingly made the area of common grace and common
ground between man and man, then the doctrine of creation is
set aside, and common grace is ultimately equated with common
divinity and common being. Not all proponents of common
grace on such grounds are aware of the final implications of their
position; many are earnestly convinced that it is the Reformed
faith they defend, but such, nonetheless, is the meaning of their
stand.
Calvin, as Van Til points out, distinguished between
proximate and ultimate causes. Historical causes have genuine
meaning just because of Gods ultimate plan. God reaches down
into the self-consciousness of each individual. To those who
believe that human and divine activity are both creative, and
that they cannot be simultaneous and coextensive, it is impossible
to speak satisfactorily without either surrendering the
sovereignty of God or the reality of secondary causes such as the
integrity of mans will. Their logic requires a surrender of
either God or man.
Let us, rather than try to meet the objectors desires for supposed
consistency in logic, not deny the fact of Gods revelation of His
general favor to mankind or the fact of Gods wrath resting upon
the elect. To meet the objector and satisfy him we should have to
deny the meaning of all history and of all secondary causes. We
should need to wipe out the difference between God and man. To
the objector it is contradictory to say that God controls whatsoever
comes to pass and also to say that human choices have significance.13
Any attempt to limit the particularism of Gods grace and decree,
and to establish possibility outside of God by saying that men
can be saved or lost apart from God says far more than the
objector is willing to say. Either God is God, or He is not God.
Either He governs all things, or else, like unregenerate man, He
struggles in an alien universe, seeking to impose His will on a
hostile area of possibility. As Van Til summarizes it,
On this basis God Himself is involved in the realm of possibility:
how then can He even make salvation possible for any one man, let
alone making it possible for all men? If God is not the source of
possibility then He cannot make salvation possible for men: and if
He is the source of possibility then He is this source because He is
in control of all actuality.14
We have seen that behind the common grace controversy lies
the false alternative, either God or man. Hoeksemas answer
was, If I must make a choice to lose God or man, give me God.
Let me lose man. The Synod of 1924 made such a choice
impossible by its decision. Its decision, however, while wise, is
only an elementary formulation. Even as the Apostles Creed
was an early statement of faith, and fully valid, yet not definitive
enough to eliminate heretical opinions on the nature of Christ,
so are the Three Points of 1924, valid but far from complete.
The Creeds of Niceae and Chalcedon were necessary to give
more specifically the orthodox Christology. They did not
constitute a criticism of the Apostles Creed but were a
development of the orthodox faith. In like manner, the Three
Points are to be regarded as only the beginning, but a valid
beginning, of the definition of common grace. Such a
development is resented by those who are unwilling to think,
even as in the early church many felt that Paul unnecessarily
complicated the simple faith. Peter, in commenting on the fact
that these unstable men distorted Pauls writings, aptly
commented that they did the same also with the rest of
Scripture.15
The Three Points then are a beginning. As such, they have
wisely eliminated, as the controversy which precipitated their
formulation required, those who with Hoeksema said, Let me
lose man. Even as the supposedly orthodox party in New
England, by turning total depravity into absolute depravity, and
by denying common grace decided to lose man, so the current
champions of a wooden and unbiblical orthodoxy are ready to
drop man. On the other hand, however, the Three Points do
not deal with the other party, those who are ready to say, as
against Hoeksema, If I must make a choice to lose God or man,
give me man. Let me lose God. The offense of Van Tils
Common Grace was that, although affirming the decision against
Hoeksema, he went further and pointed out that a biblical
doctrine of common grace means also the exclusion of those
who choose man to the limitation of God. On this ground the
heat and passion manifested against Van Til becomes
understandable. By reviving the common grace question and
extending its scope, he eliminated the hiding place of a group
whose discrepancy with the faith had not yet been dealt with.
Daane, in the name of Calvinism, objects to Gods eternal
decree as the point of departure, and the ontological trinity as
the basic principle of interpretation.16 Throughout his book,
he finds the sovereign and self-contained God an abstract and
incomprehensible starting point, and prefers instead a
Christological or relational one. While himself assuming an
existentialist starting point, he wildly charges Van Til with
being an existentialist, a Kantian, and a follower of
Kierkegaard,17 a fact, which if true, would certainly be welcome
news to Barth and Brunner, who find in Van Til their most
formidable opponent!
At Nicea and Chalcedon, Christology was used as a line of
defense for the natural man. Ostensibly in defense of now the
humanity and then the deity of Jesus Christ, opinions were
introduced which tended to the paganizing of the gospel and the
reassertion of natural mans rights by devious means. Since the
Reformation, a new line of defense has been in process of
formation, the grace of nature or common grace. The locale
of the
struggle, has changed from age to age, but the battle remains
the same.
In Daane we have a bold assertion of the rights of natural man
against God. His attack has two central emphases, first on the
invalidity of the concept of the self-contained God and His
decree as definitive for theology and a proper starting point,
and, second, that possibility and existence can be defined
independently of God and that man accordingly has possibilities
apart from the decree of God.18
By making Gods eternal decrees his point of departure, Van Til
cannot do justice to his own fine emphasis that common grace must
be understood in reference to the moving stream of time. Gods
eternal decrees are timeless, and when these are made the basis of
the common-grace problem and the point of departure for our
reflection on the problem, the whole matter will remain within
the sphere of the timeless.19
Here again, as with Hoeksema, the basic fallacy is apparent and

obvious. God and man are placed in water-tight compartments,
so that Gods activity cannot be simultaneous and coextensive
with mans and at the same time determinative. Because Gods
eternal decree is timeless, the common grace question, dealing
as it does with the moving stream of time, must be understood
in terms of time only, because Gods eternal decree is hopelessly
trapped in the sphere of the timeless! But if Daane is correct
here, then the God of Calvinism, the God of Scripture, is a myth,
or, at best, hopelessly trapped in the sphere of the timeless with
regard to all things. God then becomes completely irrelevant to
man, and His existence or non-existence is merely an academic
question in view of His obvious inability to enter history.
Daanes answer to this, like the answer of Kierkegaard and Barth,
is the Christ-Event. For the ontological trinity, the
self-contained, sovereign and absolute God beyond history, it
substitutes a Christ who comes, not out of the ontological trinity
and the divine decree, but as an assertion of possibility against a
background of brute factuality. This existentialist God is not
the
God of Scripture, nor the God of the Confessions. But Daane
tries to show a need for such a theology by declaring that a God
who makes an eternal decree and is the source of all possibility
is automatically one who is limited to the timeless because He
makes time impossible.
Therefore for Daane man must have a real and metaphysical
independence from God in order to have any valid freedom.
The divine decree and real obedience or disobedience are
irreconcilable; the divine decree and human freedom are not to
be both maintained; possibility must be defined independently
of God. How clearly he asserts this is to be seen throughout his
book, so much so that he can consider the atonement itself,
not in terms of the divine decree, but in terms of possibility apart
from God.
It is only by ignoring the real possibility of obedience at the time
of the Fall that Van Til can maintain that the purpose of the general
offer in pre-Fall time was the differentiation of mankind in elect
and reprobate.20
Van Til has defined possibility as that which is coextensive with
the counsel of God. Thus in this conception there are no real
possibilities except those which already are or shall be actualized.
Van Til regards it as inconceivable that the counsel of God should
include genuine possibilities that do not become actualities in
history. Such a conception of possibility is sheer determinism and
cannot be reconciled with the traditionally held position that Adam
was created with the freedom not to sin. Nor does the Bible speak as
though all unactualized possibilities are unreal and non-existent
possibilities. Jesus in Gethsemane did not act on the principle that
there are no possibilities but those which are in fact actualized. Cf.
also Pauls statement in I Corinthians 2:7, 8 We speak Gods
wisdom in a mystery . . . which God foreordained before the
worlds unto our glory: which none of the rulers of this world hath
known: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord
of glory.21
As Van Til aptly comments, Here again Daane assumes, with
Kierkegaard, that finite existence is a concept that must be
defined independently of God. It must not be defined in terms
of
22
God. Daane wants the independence of man apart from the
counsel of God.23
For his deviation, Hoeksema was properly challenged, and
left the Christian Reformed Church. Daane, for his deviation,
has not yet been brought to task, while the church has seen many
voices raised against Van Til (not a member of that communion).
This is regrettable, but not surprising, but characteristic of the
church as a whole in many an age since Pauls day, for there is
unhappily reason to believe that man often has more friends in
the church than God has.
Although the battle remains the same, the locale has changed
from age to age and is at present centered, depending on the
sector, on common grace, inspiration and the self-sufficiency of
God. But at every point the whole issue is re-opened; the whole
of the faith is at stake. While past victories of the faithful are
ostensibly re-affirmed, new interpretations are used to empty
them of meaning and to borrow the victory for alien causes. Thus
Van Til rightly assesses the full scope of the common grace
controversy.
The significance of our discussion on fact, law and reason for the
construction of a Christian philosophy of history may now be
pointed out explicitly. The philosophy of history inquires into the
meaning of history. To use a phrase of Kierkegaard, we ask how the
Moment is to have significance. Our claim as believers is that the
Moment cannot intelligently be shown to have any significance
except upon the presupposition of the biblical doctrine of the
ontological trinity. In the ontological trinity there is complete
harmony between an equally ultimate one and many. The persons
of the trinity are mutually exhaustive of one another and of Gods
nature . . .
We argue that unless we may hold to the presupposition of the
self-contained ontological trinity, human rationality itself is a
mirage.24
Philosophers have through the ages sought for a principle of
interpretation such as Scripture gives, the ontological trinity,
but sinful human nature rebels against this obvious fact because
it hates God and prefers, as Van Til states, to speak of abstract
principles of truth, goodness, and beauty, and of a God rather
than the God. But God is our concrete universal; in Him
thought and being are coterminous, in Him the problem of
knowledge is solved, 25 and the problem of time and history
as well.
It is not merely common grace then that is preserved by this
approach; it is the whole of faith, and the whole of reality and
experience. In the common grace controversy, some, on the one
hand, sought to limit or obliterate man, and others, God, as a
result of their unbiblical principles. But in every deviation from
biblical thinking, no matter how well intentioned, there is a
limitation or obliteration of some aspect of experience and
reality. Van Tils defense of the faith is therefore a defense of
the validity of the whole of life because it is a defense and
exposition of the biblical doctrine of God.
NOTES
1. Experience Mayhew, cited in H. Shelton Smith: Changing Conceptions of

Original Sin, A Study in American Theology Since 1750, p. 21. (New York:
Scribners) 1955.
2. E. M. Wilbur A History of Unitarianism, 1946, p. 15f.
3. Herman Hoeksema: The Protestant Reformed Churches in America. Their
Origin, Early History and Doctrine. 1936, p. 16 (Grand Rapids, Mich.).
4. See C. Van Til: Defense of the Faith, p. 424 ff.
5. Cited in A. C. de Jong: The well-Meant Gospel Offer: the Views of H.
Hoeksema and K. Schilder, p. 79f.
6. Ibid., p. 81.
7. See James Daane: A Theology of Grace, 1954 (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids,
Mich.), W. Masselink Common Grace and Christian Education (Mimeographed
syllabus, 1951) and General Revelation and Common Grace, 1953.
8. C. Van Til: A Letter on Common Grace, p. 39.
9. Ibid., p. 41.
10. Ibid., p. 61.
11. Ibid., p. 65f.
is. C. Van Til: Common Grace and Witness Bearing, p. 9.
13. Ibid., p. 21 f.
14. C. Van Til: Particularism and Common Grace, p. 19.
15. II Peter 3:15f.
16. James Daane: A Theology of Grace, pp. 24f., 102f., 106, 111, etc
17. Ibid., pp. 49, 59, 93, 101, 118, 120f., 130, 146.
18. For a more extensive analysis of Daanes ideas, see C. Van Til: The Defense
of the Faith, pp. 398-423; Earl Zetterholm in Torch and Trumpet, March, 1957,
Vol. 6, No. 10, Is it Really Possible?, April, 1957, Vol. 7, No. 1, Unactualized
Possibilities and the Confessions; May-June, 1957, Vol. 7, No. 2, and Oct., 1957,
Vol. 7, No. 5, The Inescapable Cross.
19. Daane, op. cit., p. 24.
20. Ibid., p. 68.
21. Ibid., Ftnote , p. 68. For a n extensive critic ism of this aspect of Daanes
thinking, see Zetterholm, op. cit.
22. C. Van Til: Defense of the Faith, p. 417.
23. Ibid., p. 422.
24. C. Van Til: Common Grace, pp. 7f., 9.
25. Ibid., p. 64.
8.
The Image of God and Faceless Man
The doctrine of the image of God in man has more than an

academic relationship to the central problems of philosophy
and theology. Moreover, it has a practical relevancy. Man today
is unable to define himself because he has no standard in terms
of which he can define anything. Man today is unable to know
himself, because he also lacks a standard whereby he can know
anything. No amount of miscellaneous data is able to overcome
this shortcoming. Mans knowledge today is Alexandrian, masses
of detail without a focus. And according to Christian faith, to
know himself man must know God, because it is in Gods image
that he is created. Moreover, as Van Til states,
To not know God man would have to destroy himself. He cannot do
this. There is no non-being into which man can slip in order to
escape Gods face and voice. The mountains will not cover him;
Hades will not hide him. Nothing can prevent his being confronted
with Him with whom we have to do. Whenever he sees himself,
he sees himself confronted with God.1
The concept of the image of God has received renewed
attention from neo-orthodoxy, but only to its confusion. Lacking
the Creator-creature distinction and a true principle of
discontinuity because it fails to believe in creation, neo-orthodoxy
confuses the image with correspondence to or participation in
being. The result is a confusion of finitude with sin. Man has
confused finitude with sin because he is in sin. Having made
himself good in his own eyes, man sees his shortcoming, not as
an ethical one, but as a metaphysical one. Mutability and
finitude trouble him and are sin in his eyes, because he is set on
being god, determin-
122
ing good and evil for himself, and establishing his reason as
arbiter over all things. Man cannot see sin as Scripture sees it
unless he believes in the God of Scripture.
What then is the image of God, and what is its theological
importance? The Scholastic view of the image was that it is a
donum superadditum. The sense-world was viewed in
semi-pagan terms, as pre-existing and more or less evil or
undesirable. The material was sharply distinguished from the
spiritual, the latter being the domain of religion. One left the
world and renounced material things to serve God. Because of
this division of matter and spirit, and because the spirit had a
special affinity to God in this thinking, the body was regarded
as divisive, and the spirit, carrying the image, unitive with God.
Protestantism has not been free from this same strain, as witness
Robert Halls comment in his sermon on The Spirituality of
the Divine Nature: The body has a tendency to separate us
from God by the dissimilarity of its nature; the soul, on the
contrary, unites us again to him, by means of those principles and
faculties which, though infinitely inferior, are of a character
congenial to his own. The body is the production of God; the
soul is his image. Similarly Chalmers declared, The mind of
man is a creation, and therefore indicates by its characteristics
the character of Him to the fiat and the forthcoming of whose will
it owes its existence. Chafer, who cites these statements,
declares also, It is not asserted that mans corporal nature is
involved in this comparison, since it is predicated of God that He
is Spirit (John 4:24).2 But if the body and matter are also the
creation of God, will they not equally reveal their Maker? And if
the soul has so substantial an affinity to God by mere virtue of
being spirit then why is it that Scripture regards the most
heinous sins (contemporary opinion in the pew to the contrary)
to be sins of the spirit? And why are the most spiritual people
consistently the greatest plague to the Church?
Implicit in these opinions is the leaven of paganism, a dualism
between matter and spirit and a belief that matter is, if not evil,
at the very least lower. Implicit also is a metaphysical rather than
ethical approach to the question of the image. Since God is
Spirit, then His image can only be that which is also spirit; since
God is not matter, His image cannot be imparted to matter,
which is regarded at best as a mere production of God and hence
alien to Him in a sense which spirit cannot be.
Luther failed to break fully with the Scholastic conception of
man and viewed the image of God exclusively in terms of the
moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness and holiness, to
which subsequent generations added dominion with respect to
the male. Calvin, on the other hand, thought of the image in
the wider sense, as consisting of mans intellect and will.
Although Calvin saw the centrality of righteousness and true
holiness to any concept of God, he remarked that it is not the
whole of Gods image. The image extended to every aspect of
mans being, his body and soul, so that Calvins comment
concerning mans image and dominion, Thus man was rich
before he was born, is especially appropriate.
Therefore by this word the perfection of our whole nature is
designated, as it appeared when Adam was endued with a right
judgment, had affections in harmony with reason, had all his senses
sound and well-regulated, and truly excelled in everything good.
Thus the chief seat of the Divine image was in his mind and
heart, where it was eminent: yet was there no part of him in which
some scintillations of it did not shine forth.8
To include the whole of mans personality in the image of God
was a step with tremendous implications concerning the nature
of man, his relationship to the world and his relationship to God.
As Van Til has observed, in commenting on the pagan leaven
in the Scholastic doctrine:
Man was in part formed out of this pre-existing sense-world.
Accordingly, the whole of mans relationship as a self-conscious
being was not with the personality of God. In other words, mans
relationship to the world about him was not completely mediated
through the personality of God. There was a remnant of
impersonalism about it all. 4
For man to be created in Gods image means that he is like
God in ever y respect in which a creature can be like God. It
means, in the wider sense, that man, like God, is a personality.
But man is always different from God although created in His
image, in that he is a creature, and cannot partake of the
incommunicable attributes of God, His aseity, immutabilit y,
infinity and unity. Because man was created in the image of God,
he has an organic relationship to the universe God created. As
Van Til states,
That is, man was to be prophet, priest and king under God in this
created world. The vicissitudes of the world would depend upon
the deeds of man. As a prophet man was to interpret this world,
as a priest he was to dedicate this world to God and as a king he
was to rule over it for God. In opposition to this all non-Christian
theories hold that the vicissitudes of man and the universe about him
are only accidentally and incidentally related to one another.5
Man, because he was created in the image of God, was created
with the law of God in his being. For man to live in terms of his
own nature means to live in terms of Gods law. Since every fibre
of his being was God-created and revealed moreover the impress
of Gods image, and since ever y fact in creation was God-created
and God-interpreted, man could not and cannot help both to
know God and to reveal Him in and through himself. The fall
of man, however, was mans rebellion against this realit y and
his attempt to do without God in ever y respect. Man now
attempts to deny the witness of God in his own being and in all
creation and to interpret the universe without reference to God.
The result for man was that he made for himself a false ideal of
knowledge. Man made for himself the ideal of absolute
comprehension in knowledge. This he could never have done if he
had continued to recognize that he was a creature. It is totally
inconsistent with the idea of creatureliness that man should strive
for comprehensive knowledge; if it could be obtained, it would
wipe God out of existence; man would then be God. And . . .
because man sought for this unattainable ideal, he brought upon
himself no end of woe.
In conjunction with mans false ideal of knowledge, we may mention
here the fact that when man saw he could not attain his own false
ideal of knowledge, he blamed this on his finite character. Man
confused finitude with sin. Thus he commingled the metaphysical
and the ethical aspects of reality. Not willing to take the blame
for sin, man laid it to circumstances round about him or within
him.6
Barth, Brunner and Niebuhr are ready to say that man is finite
and evil, but, being unwilling to grant that he is tr ul y created,
or that he is sinful in the sense described above, they cannot give
a biblical concept of man. Man is for them his own ultimate
point of reference because, despite their attempts to overcome
their inheritance, they still hold basicall y to the thinking o f
fallen man, that finitude is sin and the heart of mans
predicament.
But man, despite these subterfuges, cannot escape knowing
God. Nature reveals God to man, and also reveals man to
himself, having been created for man, as man was created for
God. Both nature and man are sustained b y God and under the
influence of His non-saving or common grace. Moreover, man
reveals himself to himself, and reveals God to himself. Since as
Calvin declared in the opening lines of the Institutes, our ver y
being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone, it is
impossible for mans nature to fail to reveal its Maker and
Sustainer. If the heavens declare Gods glor y, and the firmament
reveals His handiwork, how much more man, made a little
lower than God (Ps. 8 R.V.). As Van Til has observed,
commenting on Romans 1:19:
Man is and remains Gods self-conscious creature. It was in the

activity of the mind of man that Gods revelation in the created
universe originally found its highest climax. This is still the case.
The created personality is the highest manifestation of the
personality of God. Hence, in the very activity of his own
personality, man is placed before the clearest manifestation of the
truth with respect to himself, apart from redemptive revelation.7
If all facts are created facts, then no facts are neutral in their
witness to the Creator, least of all man, not only a creature but
formed in the image of God. To presuppose a neutrality of data,
and to presuppose a neutrality of witness on man s part, is to
deny that God created all things and to deny that man is created
in His image. The basic ques tion is this: is man faceless? Is he
no more than a blank? If he is faceless and a blank, then neutrality
is possible. But if man is truly created in Gods image, then
neutralit y is an imp ossib ilit y and the pretense to it no more
than disguised hostility. T o hold that neutrality is possible is
to eliminate God as Creator and relegate Him, at best, to a
position of another fact among many miscellaneous and
meaningless facts, a fact, moreover, which, like some strange
species of life, remains unknown until discovered. T his, in fact,
is pr ecisely what Clark does with God.
For an illustration, suppose that the discoverer of an uninhabited

island in some remote ocean should search it to determine whether
a particular form of animal life ever existed in that place. It is
quite possible for him to search carefully and, discovering no
evidence, still remain in ignorance. He could not be sure, however,
that the particular animal had never lived on the island, because,
even though the search had been diligent, still tomorrow the remains
might be discovered. Similarly, aside from the question whether
much or little evidence is needed to lead one to a belief in God, it
is clear that no finite amount of searching could rationally lead one
to deny the existence of God. During the time of the atheists
investigation of this earth, it just might be that God was hiding on
the other side of the moon, and if some rocket should take the
atheist to the moon, there is no reason to hold that God might
not go over to Jupiterfor the express purpose of inconveniencing
the atheist.8
If God is so elusive a fact, then indeed He is a seriously limited

and irrelevant God. If such neutrality of investigation and
neutrality of data exis ts, then the doctrine of creation and the
doctrine of the image of God are sheer nonsense, lovely tales, no
doubt, but practically meaningless. Van Til has aptly observed,
of Clarks statement,
But a God who can thus escape to the moon or to Jupiter is not
inconveniencing the atheist at all. On the contrary, he shows
himself to be so finite, so insignificant that the atheist can cover
the whole earth without being confronted by him. This is the
exact reverse of the teaching of Calvin, based on Paul, that God is
divinity and power, being always and everywhere so obviously
present, that he who says there is no God is a fool. The foolishness
of the denial of the creator lies precisely in the fact that this creator
confronts man in every fact so that no fact has any meaning for man
except it be seen as Gods creation. 9
Man meets the revelation of God at every turn, and in ever y
fibre of his being; it is impossible for him to find a single fact, a
single event, a single blade of grass, which does not bear witness
to creation and dema nd a God-given interpretation. And man
cannot meet a single fact, nor live a single moment, without
confronting God. But whenever man is confronted by the
revelation of God in and through all creation, he reacts to it;
neutrality is impossible. He reacts, inevitably, in terms of an
attempt to be his own god and interpreter, or els e a godly
acceptance of his role as Gods image, and his calling to be
prophet, priest and king under God. But, because the issues of
history are not yet settled, and because epistemological
self-consciousness has not yet fully come upon the tares and the
wheat, the reaction is not so clear-cut but is rather a mixed
reaction and a mixed interpretation. In the godly, the effects of
the fall often hamper his acceptance of his role and of his full
subservience to the God-given interpretation. In the ungodly,
created also in Gods image, common grace, creation grace in that
it is a mark of their creation by God in His image, with His
general favor, and in original righteousness, the full effects of
the fall are not yet manifest. Their epistemological
self-consciousness is not yet complete, and their life and
interpretation again is a mixed product. O ne cannot deal with
common grace seriously or correctly apart from the doctrines of
creation and the image of God.
The fall then has vitiated mans nature. This taint is total,
in that it affects all of mans nature, but it is not absolute, nor
will it be absolute until history ends. It is total, in that the whole
personality of man is fallen. As Van Til points out, we have no
ground for assuming that the will is fallen and reason still sound,
or, on the other hand, that reason is fallen and intuitions remain
sound. The whole personality of man is affected, and his body,
soul and mind weakened and perverted. Moreover, since Gods
image requires Gods glory, man, in his fallen attempts to
establish his own glory, finds the whole of his personality and
every aspect of his being dogged by self-frustration. He is Gods
creation and Gods instrument, and as he puts himself to misuse,
he finds himself blunted, warped and tortured by his own
perversity. Because ungodly man is not yet a finished product,
his frustration as well as his perversity is not yet absolute. When
history ends in judgment and the new creation, the fulness of
frustration will appear in the fulness of hell. Meanwhile, man
tries every expediency and device to deny the witness of creation
and his own being and to find a refuge in any and everything
including and especially some kind of God and religion. As
Van Til has observed. Men cannot be brought to bay if they
have any place to which they can go.10
On the other hand, godly man seeks to grow in his salvation,
in the working out of the meaning of the image of God in every
walk of life. He seeks to interpret the world, and to subdue it,
in every avenue of life, in science, agriculture, industry, and
education. He seeks to rule under God, and as priest to dedicate
all of creation and all of his activity to God. He seeks to grow
in righteousness, that is, to become a whole person, to maintain
within his being the proper coordination and subordination of
each and every aspect of his nature, to subordinate himself to
God, and to coordinate himself with his fellow man. He
recognizes increasingly that because creation is revelational,
showing forth at all times the creative and sustaining will of
God and offering facts interpretative of His will, that he is at all
times in contact with the expressed will of God.
But full epistemological self-consciousness will not come until
the end. Hence, as we have seen, the creation grace still manifests
itsel f clearl y in the unregenerate. The doctrine of com mon
grace, like the doctrine of saving grace, is dependent upon sound
conceptions of the self-contained God, creation, and the image
of God. As V an T il points out,
To set the doctrine of common grace in the proper perspective
therefore requires setting off Reformed theology as a whole from
Romanist and also from evangelical thinking. On a Romanist
basis even special grace is largely thought of along the lines of lifting
man in the scale of being. On its basis common grace would
therefore be only gradationally different from special or saving
grace. No other than gradational differences are possible once one
holds to the human will as in some measure autonomous, and once
one holds to the idea of man as participant in the same being with
God. The idea of saving grace is then the offering to all men or at
least to groups of men the real or ultimate possibility of salvation
along with the equally ultimate possibility of destruction. In no case
can God overcome completely the tendency of finite beings to slip
into non-being.11
Without a conception of God as autonomous and self-contained,
without the doctrines of creation and the discontinuity between
God and created being, mans conception of both saving and
common grace becomes a matter of com mon participation in
being or a doctrine of correspondence. It becomes necessary, in
the name of common grace, to assert, against predestination, a
doctrine of freedom for Adam which is not creaturely freedom
but the ultimate freedom of God. The doctrine of creation and
the doctrine of the image of God in man make impossible this
pagan notion of common grace, which is actually a doctrine of
common being. Common grace then becomes metaphys ical in
character, in that it preserves the finite man from slipping back
into non-being. But, as Van Til observes, only b y maintaining
its exclusively ethical character can common grace be properly
related to saving grace.12 The problem of common grace is an
attempt to deal with the civil righteousness of the unregenerate,
in other words, with the question of ethics. To answer it by
revising ones metaphysics is hardly a Christian answer! The
doctrine of creation and creation grace, of the divine decree and
the unfinished nature of history, provide the answer, an ethical
answer within the framework of Christian metaphysics. In
Common Grace, Van Til points out emphatically that all men
have all things in common, psychologically and metaphysically.
But epistemologically, the natural man has nothing in common
with the Christian. He asserts his own ultimacy and tries to
rethink all things in terms of this concept. But God does not
leave natural man wholly to himself. He strives with man,
restrains the wrath of man, acts with forbearance, and sends His
rain and sunshine upon the just and unjust alike. This
epistemological difference between the Christian and the natural
man is not with regard to the laws of thought but with regard to
the ethical presuppositions underlying thought.
Natural man is at war with himself. Created by God, and in
his image, his being testifies against him as he tries to assert his
own ultimacy and autonomy. He is surrounded by the
restraining power of Gods common grace. His own awareness
of the full and open implications of his claims is not yet fully
mature or self-conscious. As a result, there is no consistency in his
working principles. He has some ideas derived from the image
of God, and some derived from his idea of autonomy.
It is thus in the mixed situation that results because of the factors

mentioned, (1) that every man knows God naturally (2) that every
sinner is in principle anxiously striving to efface that knowledge of
God and (3) that every sinner is in this world still the object of the
striving of the Spirit calling him back to God, that cooperation
between believers and unbelievers is possible. Men on both sides
can, by virtue of the gifts of God that they enjoy, contribute to
science. The question of ethical hostility does not enter in at this
point. Not merely weighing and measuring, but the argument for the
existence of God and for the truth of Christianity, can as readily
be observed to be true by non-Christians as by Christians. Satan
knows all too well that God exists and that Christ was victor over
him on
Calvary. But the actual situation in history involves the other factors
mentioned. Thus there is nowhere an area where the second factor,
that of mans ethical hostility to God, does not also come into the
picture. This factor is not as clearly in evidence when men deal
with external things; it is more clearly in evidence when they deal
with the directly religious question of the truth of Christianity. But
it is none the less present everywhere. It is present in the field of
weighing and measuring, in the field of externals as well as in the
field of more directly religious import. It is present here in that the
natural man attempts to impose his false philosophy of fact upon
the things that he weighs and measures. This is not theoretically the
case so long as he uses these facts for non-scientific purposes. It is
even then practically the case. Even then he does not seek to obey
Pauls injunction to men to the effect that whether they eat or
drink they should do all things to the glory of God. But it is
theoretically the case when they seek to work scientifically. In that
case non-believers use a non-rationalistic principle of individuation.
They assume that the facts they weigh and measure are not created
and controlled by God. They assume this with respect to every fact.
Thus they assume that God does not speak to them through these
facts. On the other hand they assume that the powers of logic given
them by their creator are not so given them. They virtually assume
that by these powers they can determine what is possible and what
is impossible.13
The natural mans conception of fact is that factuality is

independent of God, and that he himself is also at the very least
independent. For him, any kind of fact can exist rather than only
God-given facts. Moreover, these facts receive their
interpretation from man rather than from God. Every fact then
that has scientific standing is such only if it does not reveal God,
but does reveal man as ultimate. 14 Thus, the natural man
operates on two principles, first, the existence of brute factuality,
and, second, on the basis that he is the ultimate interpreter. A
third principle prevents the full operation of the first two;
common grace prevents him from being fully consistent. He
finds himself respecting the honest, noble and true, and often
makes a better neighbor, as Calvin and Van Til after him have
pointed out, than the
Christian. Their metaphysical constitution remains unchanged;
their ethical rebellion is restrained by common grace.
On his own principles, the natural man could have no science;
he would have nothing but the miscellaneous and unrelated mass
of data gleaned from brute factuality. The doctrine of creation
gives meaning and interpretation to all things and makes the
unity of science possible. But, since creation and the fall, there
has been a development in two directions, towards the fulfilment
of mans rebellion in full and self-conscious evil, and towards the
fulfilment of mans calling in good. The two tendencies are
destined to grow more self-conscious and more consistent in
every respect. It is in this sense that common grace is earlier
grace, earlier in terms of the ultimate outcome. In the end, men
will be either fully restored in the image of God, or fully
confirmed as covenant-breakers, as men declaring themselves
to be ultimate rath er th an God . The fal l an d th e
rest oratio n will each be completed in their respective
implications.
The matter then is clear-cut. Despite the modern outlook,
man is not faceless; he is not a blank moving out of non-being
into being. He is a creature, more than that, a creature created
in the image of God. This image is his face, his whole personality.
Ungodly man, striving to put on the mask of deity denies God in
the process and ends up in total frustration as earlier grace gives
way to full epistemological self-consciousness. At present, we
have a still more or less undifferentiated stage of development,
but when all the reprobate are epistemologically self-conscious
the crack of doom has come.15 The fall will have become
absolute and the restoration complete.
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: A Christian Theory of Knowledge, p. 177.

2. Lewis Sperry Chafer: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, p. 181f. (Dallas Seminary
Press).
3. John Calvin: Commentary upon the Book of Genesis, Vol. I, pp. 94ff., Gen.
1:26 (Eerdmans, ed. 1948).
4. C. Van Til: Metaphysics of Apologetics, p. 63.
5. C. Van Til: The Defense of the Faith, p. 30, see also Apologetics, pp. 4ff.
7. C. Van Til: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1958, p. 92.
8. Gordon H. Clark: A Christian Philosophy of Education, p. 44 (Eerdmans).
On the other hand, Clark wisely observes, instead of beginning with facts and
later discovering God, unless a thinker begins with God, he can never end with
God, or get the facts either (p. 38).
9. C. Van Til: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1952, p. 102.
12. Ibid., p. 187.
13. Ibid., p. 191.
14. Ibid., p. 182.
15. C. Van Til: Common Grace, p. 85.
9.
The Meaning of Inspiration
The doctrine of the inspiration and authority of Scripture

has been persistently relegated to the background in the past
half century by many who regard it as of peripheral importance
only. And yet here as in few places else some of the central issues
of philosophy and theology are brought to focus.
There are, basically, three possible answers to the question of
an authoritative and inspired word. First, it can be held that
there is either no God at all, or only a God who remains outside
of mans purview, or a God who does not choose to speak through
Scripture. In this instance, Scripture ceases to be the word of
God; man alone speaks, and however highly we rate the Bible,
it is the voice of man and of man only. Second, it can be
maintained that Scripture contains the word of God, that both
God and man speak creatively, but that God as the hidden and
transcendental one, cannot be identified with the written word.
He is hidden in the word, speaks through the word, and
encounters man through the word, and revelation is essentially
subjective. It can never be reduced to a set of objective written
truths given in a book. The third view asserts that while man
certainly speaks from beginning to end in Scripture, God alone
speaks creatively. Scripture is therefore in the fullest sense of the
word the inspired and authoritative word of God.
The importance and implications of these three positions
cannot be understood without an analysis of their basic
presuppositions, and nowhere does this analysis more clearly
appear than in the writings of Van Til.
The first position, whether it acknowledges God or not, in-
135
evitably lapses into relativity and into nihilism. If man alone
speaks, and if man alone is the interpreter of life and reality,
then man has no standard beyond himself. No attempt to
establish a standard escapes the collapse into subjectivity and
relativity. Consider, for example, the approach to the Ten
Commandments. A man born with an inheritance of Christian
morality may drop the first four Commandments and insist on
the humanistic validity of the latter six and feel this to be a
sufficient and valid basis for life. The question can be
immediately raised by one who calls the validity of the seventh
commandment into question that humanistic fulfillment
requires the abolition of this law, and only an outworn,
guilt-ridden and masochistic psychology keeps men from
unshackling themselves. Every single commandment has at one
time or another been dispensed with in some functioning and
successful society, and the C hristian interpretation too
infrequently regarded. Moral relativism and pragmatism
become inescapable. Chastity becomes defended on pragmatic
grounds as socially or psychologically necessary, and becomes
attacked on equally pragmatic grounds as a restraint on life.
Philosophically, mans every attempt to establish a law or
universal likewise fails. Without an absolutely sovereign God and
an infallible Word, every universal is inevitably a construct of
the human mind. Mans knowledge of things is both limited and
subjective; he cannot establish universals either on the basis of
an exhaustive knowledge, for most of reality is a mystery to him,
or on the basis of a knowledge of things-in-themselves. His
knowledge is only of sensations or of the phenomenal world;
reality itself remains unknowable. Thus, to hold that man alone
spea ks in Scripture is to destroy not only the truth of Scripture
but all truth and to reduce all knowledge to subjectivism and
relativism. Man indeed becomes an island in himself, hearing no
voice but his own, and committed only to suicide. Nietzsches
nihilism is the only consistent exposition of this position; every
attempt on his part to establish a universal without God and
Scripture failed. Not even life could be a universal, because he
now had no criterion whereby
to call it good, and hence his ultimate counsel of suicide. To
deny God is also ultimately to deny man, and to deny life and
knowledge as well, because God is the only creator and sustainer
of all things, and without Him the only alternative is the
negation of all things.
The second position is more commonly encountered. Man
and God both speak creatively in Scripture. The word of God
is there, but it is a hidden, subjective word, appearing only in
the divine-human encounter. This point of view is especially
common to neo-orthodoxy, although, in varying forms, it
appears in other theologies. An infallible Word given by an
absolute God is an offense to this position; it is a negation of
man and of his freedom; it is a denial of history and of time.
The Bible cannot be taken, in this sense but only as myth and
symbol. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, insists that the
symbols must be taken seriously but not literally, for to take
them literally would be to presuppose an eternity which
annuls rather than fulfills the historical process.1 Here the
issue is very clearly stated. For God alone to speak creatively in
Scripture is to nullify time and history at the expense of eternity.
An infallible Scripture means an absolutely sovereign God who
rules all His creation and determines the course of all things.
Mans thinking then cannot be interpretative but only
re-interpretative, not creative but rather analogical; man must
think Gods thoughts after Him and re-interpret time and
history in terms of an already established divine interpretation.
This orthodox faith challenges mans claim to autonomy, his
desire to be, in some degree, his own god and an independent
creature and to have an independent interpretation of reality.
Man wants to be a co-worker with God, a junior god, ready to
recognize Gods senior status but together to face up to the
universe as a common problem which both must work at.
History is not determined by eternity but by time, and both
God and man must struggle in time to interpret and determine
history. This view wants God, but not an absolute and
sovereign God; it wants God to speak, but not more clearly than
man speaks. It wants God, but at the price of His
self-sufficiency, His ver y godhood. Man must remain as the
central figure on the stage of time, and mans voice must speak
most clearly; Gods voice cannot speak apart from the subjective
divine-human encounter. If He speaks in objective truths in a
book, in a s ystem of doctrine and a philosophy of histor y set
forth therein, then mans independence and histor ys centrality
as the ultimate rather than immediate arena is destroyed. Man
can sp eak apart from God, but God cannot speak apar t from
man; He is limited to a subjective divine-human encounter. The
transcendental God of neo-orthodoxy is one who is not
determinative of history; this is not biblical transcendentalism.
As a result, God is as irrelevant in this position as in the first
view. Van Til is right in maintaining that basically the issue is
between the orthodox Christian view of the self-contained God
as the final point of reference and as the only creative speaker, as
against the modern view of the would-be self-contained man
who is the final point of reference in all interpretation. 2
The third view asserts that God alone speaks creatively in
Scripture, and that man, while fully and personally participating
in the writing of Scripture, did not participate creatively. God
alone creates, determines and sustains all things that come to
pass; He alone speaks authoritatively. Eternity determines time.
Mans role is re-interpretative and analogical. But it does not
destroy history to make eternity determinative of it, any more
than our inability to walk up the side of a wall destro ys our
abilit y to walk. Without the infallible and authoritative voice
of God, man can hear no voice but his own; he has no course
save relativism and nihilism. No law of contradiction and no
universal can survive in a world wherein God does not first of
all speak, and speak with authority. History becomes real only
because the Scriptures are true and the God of the Scriptures
absolutely governs and predestines all things. Man lives in a
created world, of created things and created acts. His life
therefore is lived in a personalistic universe where he meets God
everywhere, because every fact is a God-given, God-determined
and God-in terp reted fact. His life and histor y ar e ther efor e
meaningful, and he is rescued from nihilism precisely because
God is self-sufficient and sovereign and speaks authoritatively
and gives man the meaning and interpretation of life. In all of
this, the Bible has a central position. It is not to be used, as Van
Til points out, as a source book in biology or as a substitute for
a paleontological study in Africa. The Bible does not claim to
offer a rival theory that may or may not be true. It claims to have
the truth about all facts.3 Sinful man can know nothing without
the fully authoritative and inspired Scripture, unless of course
he operates on borrowed principles. If God does not speak, man
cannot speak; he is lost in subjectivity. For Sartre, there is no
law-maker other than man himself, and man is therefore trapped
in subjectivity and the existence of and relation to other men
becomes a problem very inadequately resolved by
inter-subjectivity. Not only our knowledge of God but our
knowledge of all things depends upon an inspired and
authoritative word of God in which God speaks clearly.
The authority of Scripture must rest, moreover, not on mans
testing and approval of it but on Gods priority and Gods
requirement of subjection to His authority. When Bernard
Ramm, in The Pattern of Authority, defines authority first of all
without God and then says we can commence with God, he has
said first of all that Gods authority needs validation by man.
Mans authority is assumed and presupposed to be prior and
both self-validating and God validating! When Carnell says,
Bring on your revelations! Let them make peace with the law of
contradiction and the facts of history, and they will deserve a
rational mans assent,4 he puts rational man, regenerate and
unregenerate, as judge over God and His word and sets up a
standard of truth above and beyond Christianity itself.
The orthodox view of the authority of Scripture is often
rejected as involving circular reasoning; it is charged that it is
merely reasoning from God to God, and from the Bible to the
Bible. There is no reason in denying this charge. Rather, it must
be affirmed that in a very real sense all reasoning is circular
reasoning. Men move from their basic presuppositions to brute
factuality, facts, whose meaning is predetermined by their
philosophic presuppositions and the subjectivity of their
reasoning, back again to their own interpretation. The thinking
of the consistent Christian is from God, through
God-interpreted and God-given facts, and is valid though
circular or spiral because it conforms to the nature of reality. All
reasoning more or less moves in terms of its basic
presuppositions, either God or autonomous man, and sees
reality in terms of it. In terms of Scripture, we must insist that
because God created all things, the full circle of meaning
exists only where He is accepted as both creator and interpreter
of reality. And these principles of interpretation come only
from an inspired and authoritative Scripture. Ultimately,
therefore, all knowledge, and not merely knowledge of God,
hinges on the doctrine of inspiration, which, accordingly, is not
peripheral but central to Christian Faith. The alternative is the
blind reaches of subjectivity and nihilism.
NOTES
1. Reinhold Niebuhr: Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 2, p. 289 (Scribners,

New York).
2. C. Van Tils Intro, to B. B. Warfield: The Inspiration and Authority of the
Bible, p. 18 (Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia).
4. E. J. Carnell: An Introduction to Christian Apologetics, p. 178 (Eerdmans).
10.
Dictation and Inspiration
The dictation theory of inspiration brings to focus some of

the central issues concerning the doctrine of inspiration.
Evangelical thinking has fretted at the word dictation and yet
tended to gravitate towards the concept. Liberal scholars have
used the word to caricature the doctrine as mechanical, rigid
and incredible in terms of human psychology. It is asserted that
it is impossible to hold to verbal inspiration without affirming
dictation. If God has indeed inspired every word of the original
text of the Bible, then every word is in some sense dictated by
God, and the biblical authors therefore are no more than
stenographers who mechanically and impersonally took down
the Lords dictation, word for word, in every jot and tittle.
Against this argument evangelical thinkers have been singularly
helpless. If God is the creative author in the sense that Scriptures
and evangelical Christianity assert, then the text has in some
sense been dictated. But the word dictation carries a plain
implication of a mechanical use of the human authors which is
totally alien to the meaning of inspiration. The authors asserted
themselves to be possessed and used by the Spirit of God, not
mechanically dictated to. The word dictation is descriptive in
that it asserts the full authorship of God, but questionable in
that it implies the mechanical use of men whose mark is all too
clearly seen on every page of Scripture. What then is the
answer to this dilemma?
It should be noted that this problem is very closely related to
the general question of Gods sovereignty. It is a more specific
form of the broader question which asks if mans acts can be
personal and free when they are asserted at the same time to be
141
totally God-controlled, foreordained and predestined. More
specifically, how can both God and man be the free and personal
authors of the same text? Must we say that the activity of God
goes so far and no further, or must we assert that the activity of
God and man are simultaneous and coextensive and yet somehow
both fully personal?
Historically, the problem has arisen with especial intensity
wherever the absoluteness of God has been denied in proportion
as the freedom of man is maintained. It is therefore a by-product
of the basic problem of theology, the doctrine of God. As a result,
it is not surprising to find that the answer to this dilemma is to
be found in the philosophy of Van Til, as he deals with the basic
problems of the doctrine of God and epistemology.
The common assumption of men is that the universe is
impersonal, and that God and man alone are personal. Moreover,
it is assumed that man ceases to be personal to the extent that
he is predestined by God and determined by causes within the
universe. In other words, it is taken for granted that a personal
act can only be an individual act. As Van Til states it, the
assumption is that a personal act of man cannot at the same time
but in a different sense, be a personal act of God . . . (It) assumes
that either man or God act personally at a certain time, and at
certain place, but that they cannot act personally simultaneously
at the same point of contact . . . that personal acivity on the part
of man must always be at the expense of the personal character of
that which surrounds him. 1
A tremendous fallacy is involved in this point of view. First of
all, it depersonalizes the universe which surrounds man and
assumes that it has an existence which is independent of God.
But, if God created all things, then all creation is understandable
and has meaning only in terms of God and His creative purpose.
And if all things have meaning only in terms of God, and have
no independent domain of meaning or existence, but are
creatures and creations only, then the personal God gives
personal meaning to all things. We live therefore, not in an
impersonal but highly p ersonal universe because the
sovereign G od is a
personal God. Whenever and wherever we deal with the
universe and the things therein, we are at the same time
dealing with the personal God. Man never steps out into an
impersonal universe. At any and every point, he deals with the
personal God, and, even in dealing with himself, he still deals
with Gods creation and the personal God who, having made
him, deals with him personally in every fibre of his life and being.
Second, if man too is a created being whose life and meaning can
only be interpreted in terms of Gods personal will, then man
also is personal precisely because he is the creature of a personal
God and created in His image. Man finds his true personality, not
in a domain independent of God, nor where Gods activity
supposedly ends, but precisely in dependence on God and in
harmony with His activity. Man was therefore most fully and
truly personal when he lived obediently in Paradise, thinking
Gods thoughts after Him and working out the implications of
the divine interpretation of reality. Third, it is now apparent
that since all creation has meaning only in terms of Gods
creative will, all creation gives us personal facts. And man
being a creature, man is truly personal to the measure that he
accepts this fact concerning creation and himself. Augustine
said, Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee. Van Til
makes clear that man is most himself, most free and personal,
when he most fully lives in terms of Gods creative purpose.
Thus, the personal activity of man is not in conflict with or
independent of the personal activity of God but in
subordination to it. Man is therefore most truly personal and
free when he best fulfills his created purpose, when he is most
Spirit-filled, most God-controlled; he is personal and free
because foreordained and predestined. The only way to assert
mans freedom and personality is to declare Gods absolute
sovereignty.
This makes clear what the doctrine of inspiration involves.
The writings of David, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Paul are fully
free and personal precisely because they are fully inspired. If we
possessed non-biblical and uninspired writings of these men,
they would indeed be of interest but markedly less personal and
less revealing of these men. Thus the word dictation is
accurate in implying Gods authorship, but wholly erroneous in
its inference that mans role was mechanical, rigid, and
impersonal. Because man is a created being, he is free to the
measure that he fulfils his created purpose, to glorify God and
enjoy Him forever. The more godly we become, the more freely
and personally we live. And the writers of Scripture were most
fully and freely themselves, most personal, when they were
inspired of God to write the inerrant Scripture.
Failure to understand this significance of the doctrine of
inspiration means, therefore, a failure to understand the
doctrines of God and man. The whole of mans life is part of the
personal creative activity of God and as a result the free and
personal activity of man. Their areas of personal activity are not
exclusive and isolated, but coextensive and simultaneous.
Inspiration hence is no mechanical procedure but the
authoritative work of the personal God b y means of the fully
personal and free activity of man. As such, the doctrine is of
tremendous importance, not only in terms of our conception of
Scripture, but also our conception of God and man.
NOTES

11.
The Authority of Scripture
Man does not establish authority; he acknowledges it. This

is the proper procedure, though seldom observed. Man wants
to acknowledge only that authority which he himself establishes
or at the least gives consent to. All other authority is offensive to
his sense of autonomy and ultimacy. As a result, the claims of
Scripture are particularly offensive to the natural man, because
so much is involved in the admission of their truth.
To recognize the claims of Scripture is to accept creaturehood
and the fact of the fall. The fall necessitates an infallible Saviour
and an infallible Scripture as Van Til has shown.1 Moreover,
the concept of the infallible Word involves and requires the
idea of Gods complete control over history.2 This means that
God is self-contained and ultimate, controlling all reality, with
all reality revelational of Him, knowing all things exhaustively
because He controls completely. To accept fully the concept of
the infallible Word is to claim all facts for God and to insist
that reality can only be interpreted in terms of Him and His
Word. This runs counter to the natural mans claim to be the
point of reference and the source of ultimate interpretation of
factuality. But it is this sin of man which makes Scripture
necessary. Scripture speaks to man with authority, and with
sufficiency, that is, as a completed Word. It speaks with
perspicuity, clearly and simply telling man who he is, what
the nature of his sin is, what his remedy is and where it is to be
found. The attributes of Scripture are thus necessity, authority,
perspicuity and sufficiency.3
All this the Christian must boldly affirm, without any hesi-
145
tancy with regard to the charge of circular reasoning. As Van
Til points out,
The only alternative to circular reasoning as engaged in by
Christians, no matter on what point they speak, is that of reasoning
on the basis of isolated facts and isolated minds, with the result that
there is no possibility of reasoning at all. Unless as sinners we have
an absolutely inspired Bible, we have no absolute God interpreting
reality for us, and unless we have an absolute God interpreting
reality for us, there is no true interpretation at all.4
The issue at stake is a great one. All authority and all knowledge
are at stake in the doctrine of the infallible Word. Van Til traces
and analyzes the history and doctrine in its various forms in A
Christian Theory of Knowledge. Scripture claims to be
self-authenticating and declares that man lives by the absolute
authority of God. In the non-Christian view of things, God and
man are both involved in a principle of continuity that embraces
all being, and again both God and man are beset with a principle
of discontinuity which is in essence chance. In all this, man is
the interpreter and the point of reference.
There can be only one final reference point in predication. If man
is taken to be this final reference point his environment becomes
dependent upon him, and any other personality that may exist is
not more ultimate than he. Therefore there is no God on whom
he can feel himself dependent. He is his own god.5
No refuge from the authority of Scripture can be found in
natural theology or common grace. Too frequently now these
two areas are stressed as though an independent area of
authority or witness existed. But all creation gives a common
witness to God. All creation is revelational of Him, and its
witness a unitary one. To escape this revelation, as Van Til has
pointed out, to escape the knowledge of God, man would have
to destroy himself. But he cannot escape into any non-being,
and as a result he has no escape; he finds himself confronted
with one resounding witness in all heaven and earth, and even
in himself he is confronted with God. Precisely because this is a
world which is revelational of God, and because common grace
is real, the authorit y o f S cripture is inescapable and binding.
As Van Til so cogently summarizes it, Only in a universe that
is unified b y the plan of God can there be a once-for-all and
finished act of redemption, affecting the whole race of men. And
only on the basis of a world in which every fact testifies of God
can there be a Word of God that testifies of itself as interpreting
every other fact. 6 The Christian-theistic position, with all that it
involves and without any concessions at any point, is the onl y
position which does not destroy knowledge and reason and does
not annihilate intelligent human experience. And basic to this
position is the authority of the infallible Word, an authority
derogatory to man as god, but basic to man as man, destructive
of reason as god but determinative of reason as reason. As Van
Til states it,
. . . it must be affirmed that a Protestant accepts Scripture to be that
which Scripture itself says it is on its own authority. Scripture
presents itself as being the only light in terms of which the truth
about facts and their relations can be discovered. Perhaps the
relationship of the sun to our earth and the objects that constitute it,
may make this clear. We do not use candles, or electric lights in
order to discover whether the light and energy of the sun exist. The
reverse is the case. We have light in candles and electric light bulbs
because of the light and energy of the sun. So we cannot subject
the authoritative pronouncements of Scripture about reality to the
scrutiny of reason because it is reason itself that learns of its proper
function from Scripture.
There are, no doubt, objections that occur to one at once when he
hears the matter presented so baldly . . . All the objections that are
brought against such a position spring, in the last analysis, from the
assumption that the human person is ultimate and as such should
properly act as judge of all claims to authority that are made b y
any one. But if man is not autonomous, if he is rather what Scripture
says he is, namely, a creature of God and a sinner before his face,
then man should subordinate his reason to the Scriptures and seek
in the light of it to interpret his experience. 7
Neo -or th odo x y cann o t tol er ate a doctr in e o f S cr i p tur e in
which God speaks infallibly and objectively, because it cannot
tolerate a God who by His eternal decree has ordained all things
and has spoken authoritatively concerning them. Of Scripture
Barth has said, A human document like any other, it can lay
no a priori dogmatic claim to special attention and
consideration.8 Of miracles and the resurrection, he states, it is
beside the point even to ask whether they are historical and
possible.9 And yet Barth believes in verbal inspiration and
affirms the orthodox doctrine, but only by pouring new
meaning into the idea. He condemns the orthodox doctrine of
an objective and direct revelation as presumptuous and as an
attempt on mans part to control revelation. Yet it is Barth who
makes inspiration subjective. Scripture is the Word of God only
when men accept it as such, as witnessing to the revelation of
God. But God is free, unpredictable, hidden, and hence cannot
be bound to the written word, which can only be the means of
hearing the hidden word or inner text. In this he truly hears the
God who is exhaustively present in the process of revelation,
which is itself redemptive. The gist of all this is that man hears
himself actually when Barth claims he is hearing God;
subjectivism triumphs, because no objective Scripture and no
true and finished revelation is possible unless there be a
self-contained and autonomous God. Without such a God, there
can be no systematic theology, because God is too full of
unrealized potentialities to be predictable or His revelation
trustworthy. Without such a God, Scripture cannot be the
infallible Word, a direct and finished revelation. The offense in
the orthodox doctrine of the inspiration and authority of
Scripture is not in Jonahs experience or in problems of
chronology; it is in the God who makes Scripture possible and
speaks authoritatively in and through it. To underrate the nature
of this offense is to trifle with the claims of God and to evade
the central issue of authority.
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: The Psychology of Religion, p. 124.

3. C. Van Til: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1952 ed., pp. 139ff.
4. Ibid., p. 152.
6. Ibid., p. 179.
8. Karl Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 60 (Scribners).
9. Ibid., p. 91.
12.
The Self-Contained God
A woman in California invited her new neighbor to attend

the nearby Presbyterian church, only to meet with an explosive
and angry reaction. I hate the churches and I hate religion,
was the gist of the invited womans reply; she had no use for any
church, nor for anything connected with the churches, did not
attend and did not want to attend. And, besides, she added,
Im an Episcopalian. If nothing else, this woman showed a
sense of tradition all too common on the current religious scene.
People attend churches , not in terms of faith and life, but
in terms of taste and tradition. As a result, the old forms are
largely emptied of meaning. In terms of a theological
constituency, the Unitarian Church should command so large a
following as to earn for herself the position of the established
church of the United States. In terms of actual constituency, she
is insignificant and in sufficiently poor odor so that a recent
presidential candidate felt it wisest to join, like his opponent, a
Presbyterian Church for a more commendable odor of sanctity.
To be a Unitarian involves a break with tradition in terms of
conviction and conviction, whether in a Unitarian or a
fundamentalist dress, is in poor taste.
Traditionalism is prevalent also in ostensibly fundamentalist
and orthodox circles. Many adherents of Lutheran and
Reformed groups of militant orthodoxy remain in those circles
more for reasons of race than theology, and Scandinavian,
German and Dutch ties bind more firmly with some than do
creeds. Van Tils exposition of the Reformed faith has therefore
been doubly offensive to some, in that it challenges not only the
validity of their theological profession but also exposes their
tradi-
150
tionalism. Often this traditionalism occurs in quarters which
are earnestly and ostensibly faithful, not fully aware of the
implications of their own position. The consequences are
often most painful here.
A distressing instance of this blindness is to be seen in G. C.
Berkouwer, professor of Systematic Theology at the Free
University of Amsterdam. It comes as a shock to find so
distinguished a proponent of the Reformed faith treat so casually
the doctrine of the self-contained God. According to
Berkouwer,
It is indeed true that Van Til often paraphrases Barth. But the
difficulty arises from the fact that in this paraphrase an image of
orthodoxy is being presented which as I see it does not square at
all with the reality of orthodoxy. In the paraphrase of Barths
criticism of orthodoxy it is remarked among other things, that Barth
opposes the idea of orthodoxy which holds to God as God in
himself and as self-contained God (a phrase which recurs a good
deal in Van Til). After the paraphrase which on just about all
points does not correspond to Barths own representation, there
follows this sentence: for this orthodox scheme Barth
substitutes his idea . . . (The New Modernism, p. 161). Thus, for
example, Van Til represents Barth as saying that the persons of the
Godhead are not three centers of self-consciousness (p. 162) and he
then deduces Barths modalism from this. So too he says that Barth
clearly rejects the Chalcedon creed with its notion of the second
person of the ontological trinity taking to himself in permanent
union without confusion an already existent human nature (p.
162). The criticism of Barth, as is evident from the paraphrase in
which we often cannot recognize Barth, rests at bottom on a
particular conception of orthodoxy, a conception characterized by the
notion of the self-contained God.1
It is hard to understand how any kind of Christian orthodoxy is
possible without the concept of the self-contained God; the
ultimate alternatives are pantheism or polytheism. According
to Scripture, God was asked for His name by Moses (Ex. 3:1-15),
name being equivalent to identification, revelation of His
nature, the essence of His being. While Scripture gives many
titles to God, it records one name; the titles constitute mans
recognition, in terms of a theophany usually, of a particular
aspect of His being; the name Yahweh or Jehovah, is Gods
self-identification and constitutes His revelation of His nature
and being. God declared Himself to be I AM THAT I AM, or
HE WHO IS, the self sufficient, self-contained, and absolutely
sovereign and independent God. In declaring Himself to be
Yahweh, God plainly declared, I do not explain myself, nor can I
explain myself except in terms of My own being and
self-sufficiency, I AM THAT I AM, HE WHO IS. Thus the
name of God makes clear that He cannot be explained by
reference to anything other than Himself and His absolute
self-sufficiency, and all things else are definable only in terms of
their reference to Yahweh, the self-contained God. Not only
must we assert that Christian orthodoxy is impossible without
the notion of the self-contained God but that all things are
impossible and inexplicable apart from Him. He is the ground,
not only of orthodoxy, but the Creator of all things and their
only valid principle of interpretation.
When Berkouwer therefore accepts Barths terminology in a
Christian sense and sets aside the notion of the self-contained
God, he virtually sets aside Christianity. If I say black is black
and white is white, and another insists that black is white and
white black, we cannot be said to be in agreement merely
because we both speak the same language and deal with colors.
Barths God is not the God of Scripture, nor his concepts of
sin and grace those of Christian faith. Nor does a house built
without a foundation become a sound structure by the
incorporation of sound furnishings, Berkouwer to the
contrary.2
What does Barth say about God? God by himself is not God.
He might be something else. Only the God who reveals himself
is God. The God who becomes man is God.3 The truth of
religion is its non-historicity.4 Man himself is the real question,
and if the answer is to be found in the question, he must find an
answer in himself: he must be the answer. He does not cry for
solutions but for salvation; not for something human, but for
God, for God as his Savior from humanity.9 Mans sin therefore
is his humanity; and yet it is an impossibility. As Berkouwer
recognizes, for Barth sin is an ontological impossibility. The
struggle against sin is not ethical therefore but metaphysical; it
has cosmic proportions and is a struggle between created and
non-created being. 6 F or Barth, the Almighty is not God but
the Devil, Chaos, Evil, power in itself, the unformed chaos which
has not yet risen in the scale of being. Declares Barth, God and
power in itself are mutually exclusive. God is the essence of
the possible; but 'power in itself is the essence of the
impossible. God is defined in terms of Jesus Christ, and His
transcendence and immanence are to be defined in terms of
Christ, i.e., in terms of His relation to humanity as the essence of
their potentiality. 7
Nor is Barth alone in such thinking. For Paul Tillich, God is
being-in-itself and the ground of being, not a p erson but not
less than personal, beyond potentiality and actuality. Thus God
and man are basically correlative to one another. They are but
aspects of one Reality which is, on the one hand, purely
contingent and is, on the other hand, abstract timeless form. 8
For Joseph Haroutunian, God is literally neither living nor
non-living. The living God is thus a poetic expression.
Systematic theology is an impossibility because it limits the
freedom of God and is an illusion. Needed rather is reflective
theology. Reflective theology is essentially tentative, since it is
constantly aware of complexity and contingency in the world of
being and becoming. It is devoted to observation, reflection,
correlation, definition, correction, and redefinition, all of which
cannot be done without imagination. 9
Neo-orthodoxy is thus obviously the child of Kant and
Kierkegaard; it is dialectical in nature, and dialectical thinking
governs its theology from start to finish and renders it in effect an
anthropology instead. It is of interest in this connection to study
the letter of Hans P. Ehrenberg, written to B arth during
World War II and tracing the genesis of their common cause.
Ehrenberg, Barths philosophical analogue, close friend not
only to
Barth and Thurneysen but others of the school, is more
plain-spoken and open in his thinking.
But Kant produced one masterpiece, which was in itself a stupendous
achievement. He obliterated the division between Subject and
Object, the two fundamental concepts which since the days of the
Eleatic school were seen to be at the root of all thought, depriving
each of absolute autonomous reality. You know how he did this: by
degrading the Thing and the Ego to the level of noumena, objects
only of thought. The Thing he called the Thing-in-itself, but
disputed its ontological existence; the Ego he termed the
transcendental unity of apperception, but denied that it possessed any
metaphysical reality. He substituted for this a methodological
concept, the question of the possibility of experience. In this
way Kant produced a dialectic way of thinking. Dialectic
thinking means combining in the same moment two aspects of the
same thing. To do this was Kants achievement. He combined the
subjective and the objective aspects in the possibility of
experiencing the truth; thus the discoverability of true experience
was safeguarded. Kant, however, did not go any further than
this . . .
. . . The type of thought which had no longer to bear the burden
of the tension between subject and object, that is, post-Kantian
thought, lost all self-control; it substantiated the demand for
philosophical world-domination; it made a dictator of the autonomy
of thought . . . and authority rests in the absolute self-consciousness
which is consummated in the thinker, in Fichtes phrase, the
Messiah of speculative thought. . . .
. . . The single exception is one who was too commonplace to be
counted among the anti-idealists and precursors of the anti-idealists
of today: the materialist Feuerbach, to whom we owe the immortal
phrase, the union of I and Thou is God.
You remember my little edition of his Future of Philosophy, from
which this phrase is taken, to which I wrote a short introduction?
Of all my publications this was the only to gain your approval.
An entirely new world of thought is implicit in Feuerbachs sentence.
Subject and Object as philosophical terms were no longer held in
respect. The place of the antithesis between them was taken by a
dialectical relationship which was no more than hypothetical . . .
But what if this dialectical relationship is much more than a
phantom, namely a very real thing? What if the Object is at the
same time a Subject, a Thou, and the Subject only the identity
because it has been created as an object by the First-of-all-Subjects,
because its subjectivity depends on his objectivity? And if we cannot
speak of the Object or Thing in its two-fold objective-subjective
aspect before we are able to speak of the we which includes both
I and Thou, that is, Subject and Object together, what then?
Cant we extend this same kind of thinking to the realm of
theology? . . . Yes, if Christ is the Thou principle, the objective
ground of Truth and Life, what then is Deity itself, the
Unity-in-Trinity, but the grammatical declension of the personal
pronounI, Thou, We?10
Ehrenberg continues to say that he goes further than Barth by
emphasizing the sociological aspect, the We supplanting the I
in the Thou relationship, and in desiring to break the vicious
circle and establish the authority of belief within belief itself.
That is more than a papal kind of certainty. His clock is fast,
and Barths is slow, but the time will come when He will make
us one in spirit.
Despite the differences existing between various schools of
neo-orthodoxy, they are basically the same in their existentialist
and dialectical origin. Van Tils analysis of neo-orthodoxy in his
study, The New Modernism, An Appraisal of the Theology of
Barth and Brunner, is the definitive work in its field, often
abused and slandered but never answered.11 Neo-orthodoxy, in
rejecting the self-contained God of Scripture, along with the
Scriptures, inevitably tends to make the self-contained or
autonomous man supplant the ontological trinity. Salvation
becomes an inevitable deliverance from humanity. Sin is
metaphysical, not ethical, and means that man is low on the
scale of being, and salvation means to be lifted on the scale of
being, to be rescued from chaos. Atonement therefore is
moralistic activity which results in a metaphysical rise on the
scale of being. Salvation is therefore equal to correspondence
or participation in
being. E lection does not p ertain to persons but is inclusive and
impersonal. All men are enveloped in Christs love or essence.
Barths absolutely other God is essentially being as such, in
the Greek sense, and salvation ultimately is reabsorption.
Revelation itself is atonement and is revealed in Christ, in whom
the direction of being for man is manifested. For example, Nels
F. S. Ferre has said, T he uniqueness of Jesus was in his being
the irreversible exception who yet exemplifies what is most
potential in us all and in Gods total purpose. As Van Til
comments on Ferres imp lications, T hus histor y is
self-atoning. God through Christ is in histor y and sees to it
that universal love shall prevail among all men at last. 12 What
we have here is historic paganism in Christian guise.
The tables have been turned in theological thinking.
His torically the self-contained God as He speaks in Scripture
has been the s tarting p oint of theolog y, and mens failures
have been their lack of consistency in developing the
implications of their faith. The Westminster Confession has no
chapter on man, but gives much space to God, His decree and
other aspects of His sovereign purpose and will. No chapter is
given to man because man, considered biblically, can only be
dealt with in relation to God and His decree. Man in himself is
never considered, but God in Himself is the starting point. In
contempor ar y theolog y G od is cons idered only in relation to
man; thinking is made Christological, i.e., man-oriented, and
even a Reformed scholar regards it as an aberration to begin
with the self-contained God.
Neo-orthodoxy, trying desperately to escape from the
subjectivism of its ancestry, falls nevertheless into a position it
seeks to avoid and has only a God under the control of the
human consciousness. This failure is not due to lack of effort,
and certainly Barth has struggled heroically to overcome this
flaw, but without success. T he failure is to be found in his
inability to accept the Creator-creature dis tinction as
fundamental, and, thereb y, to distinguis h between cr eated and
uncreated being.
Gods being is uncreated and ultimate, whereas created being
is derivative. Consistently biblical thought, by fully accepting
the doctrine of creation, has a principle of discontinuity and
can affirm a self-contained God. But Barthian thought, unable
to take creation seriously, has only a scale of being and a
principle of continuity which not even the most desperate
attempts to alter can affect. Barth, from within the dialetical
tradition, tries to overcome the defect of his inheritance and
reach a wholly other God and fails completely, as Van Til
demonstrates. Van Til presents that theology of the
self-contained God clearly and consistently. But Berkouwer
apparently does not even consider the point an important one!
Yet the problem remains basic all the same. Only on a principle
of discontinuity, the doctrine of creation, can faith in the
self-contained God be maintained. Barths principle of
continuity can posit differences in being, but it cannot bring
about discontinuity between God and man because it does not
truly believe in creation; hence its concept of sin as an
ontological impossibility rather than an ethical rebellion against
God.13
It is easy for men to believe in a God of continuity; modern
scientists almost without exception believe, not in the God of
Scripture, but in a God who is but an extension of the universe
or a principle within the universe.14 Such a god is convenient
to believe in, if one is interested in a god who never gets into any
mans way, but hardly worth anything beyond that, because,
like man he faces a universe of brute factuality in which chance
is lord and mans mind the ultimate arbiter of facts. And the
God of Barthianism is equally inadequate; Barths theology does
not give us God in Himself or man in himself but Christ as the
process of interaction between God and man.
Who and what then is God? What does Christian orthodoxy
mean by speaking of the self-contained and sovereign God? The
attributes or properties of God pertinent to our present purpose
are those pertaining to His being, His knowledge, and His will,
and are His incommunicable attributes. With regard to the
being of God, we can speak, as Van Til, following Bavinck and
Berkhof, points out, of the independence or aseity of God, His
immutability, and His unity. First, the independence or aseit y
of God mean that God is in no sense correlative to or dependent
upon anything beside his own being. . . . God is absolute (John
5:26; Acts 17:25). He is sufficient unto himself. T he name
Yahweh very clearly sets forth this attribute of God. Second, the
imm utability of God means that naturally God does not and
cannot change since there is nothing bes ides his own eternal
being on which he depends (Mal. 3:6, James 1:7). 15 Third, the
infinity of God is an incommunicable attribute, which, in
relation to time is spoken of as the eternity of God, and, in respect
to space, His omnipresense.
By the term eternity we mean that there is no beginning or end or
succession of moments in Gods consciousness (Ps. 90:2; 2 Pet. 3:8).
This conception of eternity is of particular importance in Apologetics
because it involves the whole question of the meaning of the temporal
universe: it involves a definite philosophy of history. By the term
omnipresence we mean that God is neither included in space or
absent from it. God is above all space and yet present in ever y
part of it (I Kings 8:27 Acts 17:27).16
The fourth attribute is the unity of God within Himself, a unity
of both singularity (singularitatis) and simplicity (simplicitatis).
The unit y of singularity means numer ical oneness, i.e., that
there is and can be only one God, while the unity of simplicity
means that God is in no sense composed of parts or aspects that
existed pr ior to himself (Jer. 10:10; John 1:5) .
The attributes of God are not to be thought of otherwise than as
aspects of the one simple original being; the whole is identical with
the parts. On the other hand the attributes of God are not
characteristics that God has developed gradually; they are
fundamental to his being; the parts together form the whole. Of the
whole matter we may say that the unity and the diversity in God are
equally basic and mutually dependent upon one another. The
importance of this doctrine for Apologetics may be seen from the
fact that the whole problem of philosophy may be summed up in the
question of the relation of unity to diversity; the so-called problem
of the one and
the many receives a definite answer from the doctrine of the
simplicity of God.
Man cannot partake of these incommunicable attributes of God.
Man cannot in any sense be the source of his own being: man cannot
in any sense be immutable or eternal or omnipresent or simple. These
attributes therefore emphasize the transcendence of God.17
When we turn to the attributes of Gods knowledge we again
find that the question is a basic one. First of all, there is no
subconscious in God or any unrealized aspects or potentialities.
God knows Himself fully and completely and has fully known
Himself through all eternity in one eternal act of
knowledge.
There are no hidden depths in the being of God that he has not
explored. In the being of God, therefore, possibility is identical with
reality and potentiality is identical with actuality. In this respect
the knowledge of God is wholly different from ours. We can never
know the full depth of our being. With us potentiality must always
be deeper than actuality. Gods knowledge is as incommunicable
as is his being. Gods knowledge is what it is because his being is
what it is.18
Second, when we deal with Gods knowledge of things that exist
beside Himself, we see that Gods knowledge of the facts
precedes these facts. This is not a temporal precedence but
that God knows or interprets the facts before they are facts. It
is Gods plan, Gods comprehensive interpretation of the
facts that makes the facts what they are.19
Turning to the will of God, we again see the same basic
significance for Christian faith. Gods being is the only ultimate
object of both His knowledge and will. God wills himself in
all that he wills and is the final or highest goal of all that he
does. Van Tils phrasing is especially incisive here.
Two aspects of Gods will may here be distinguished. These aspects
correspond to two aspects of Gods knowledge. God knows himself
and he knows the created universe. So too God wills himself and he
also wills the created universe. When the created universe is not in
view at all it is said that God directly knows and wills himself with
all his attributes. But when the created universe is in view it must
still be said that in knowing and willing it God knows and wills
himself. God wills, that is, creates the universe. God wills, that is,
by his providence controls the course of development of the created
universe and brings it to its climax. Throughout all this he wills,
that is, he seeks his glory. He seeks his glory. He seeks it, and seeking
it sees to it that his purpose in seeking it is accomplished. No creature
can detract from his glory; all creatures, willingly or unwillingly,
add to his glory. Thus God wills himself in and through his will
with respect to created reality. Whatever God wills with respect to
the created universe is a means to what he wills with respect to
himself.
Summing up what has been said about Gods being, knowledge and
will, it may be said that Gods being is self-sufficient, his knowledge
is analytical and his will is self-referential. In his being, knowledge,
and will God is self-contained. There is nothing correlative to him.
He does not depend in his being, knowledge, or will upon the being,
knowledge, or will of his own creatures. God is absolute. He is
autonomous.20
For our present purposes, we will not examine Van Tils

rewarding comments on the communicable attributes, the
trinity and his observations on Christology. It is sufficient to
note that no biblical thinking in any area is possible if we do
not begin with the self-contained God.
This self-contained God needs no non-being to compare
Himself to, nor any being to be correlative to. He is, moreover,
incomprehensible. The concept of the incomprehensibility of
God is involved in the idea of a self-contained God. It means that
God is exhaustively comprehensible only to Himself and is
known to man only to the extent that He chooses to reveal
Himself. Seemingly, this doctrine limits the knowability of God;
actually, it makes possible valid and certain knowledge of God.
If God were not exhaustively comprehensible to Himself, He
would then not fully know Himself. There would be unexpected
possibilities in God, and mans knowledge of God would not be
certainly true knowledge, because the future would see
new
self-knowledge coming to light in God and being then revealed
to man. Moreover, God would not then be in full control of
His being, and accordingly not in full control of created being.
He would be struggling to find Himself in terms of brute
factuality, trying to give meaning and interpretation to what was
as yet unknown and uninterpreted. We can know God precisely
because He knows Himself. Gods revelation of Himself is
reliable because His self-knowledge is total. All knowledge
becomes possible because God is absolute, autonomous and
self-contained. Because He is the source of knowledge of
Himself, and the basic principle of interpretation for all
creation, we do not need to have an exhaustive knowledge of
God to have reliable knowledge, nor do we need to know all
created facts to have valid knowledge of the universe. Man
cannot comprehend all facts with his knowledge, and he
therefore cannot know God or creation exhaustively. If it is
brute factuality that he deals with, then he has no reliable
knowledge, since unrevealed possibilities still remain. But since
God has no unrealized potentialities, and since God has created
all things in terms of His plan and decree, our knowledge can be
reliable and valid. The incomprehensibility of God is thus the
basis of mans knowledge.
This concept of Gods incomprehensibility must be
distinguished from the Barthian notion. The orthodox
Christian concept holds to the internal rationality of God,
while the Barthian idea of the freedom of God holds to an inner
irrationality and unexplored potentiality in God.
Because God is incomprehensible, He is apprehensible or
knowable to man. Every fact in creation is revelational of Him,
because behind every created fact is the divine decree of the
self-contained and ontological trinity. Thus, although God is
never and can never be known exhaustively by man, and
although creation itself is not and cannot be known
exhaustively by man, yet mans knowledge is possible because
the incomprehensible and self-contained nature of God is the
guarantee of valid and reliable knowledge. Also, although man
cannot know himself exhaustively, yet he can know himself truly
to the meas-
ure that he sees himself in terms of Gods word and calling. He
cannot know anything exhaustively unless he can know God
exhaustively.
Mans knowledge and Gods knowledge coincide at every point
in that man is everywhere confronted by what is already full y
known and fully interpr eted b y God and has but one point of
re fer ence, G od . T he point of r efer ence canno t b ut be the
same for man as for God. There is no fact that man meets in any
of his inves tigation where the face of God does not confront
him. 21 But God s incomprehensibility is never reduced b y
mans growing knowledge, nor does he ever gain an identity of
content with God in his knowledge because the mind of man is
not and cannot be identical with the mind of God. His is the
mind o f a creature, and God is the Cr eator. For the mind of
man to comprehend God, it would have to be equal to the mind
of God and for the mind of man to have an identity of content
with God would require an identity of mind.
The Christian idea of human knowledge as analogical of Gods

knowledge is therefore the only position in which man, who cannot
control or know anything in the ultimate comprehensive sense of
the term, can nevertheless be assured that his knowledge is true.
To say therefore that the human mind can know even one
proposition in its minimal significance with the same depth of
meaning with which God knows that proposition is an attack on
the Creator-creature relationship and therewith an attack on the
heart of Christianity. And unless we maintain the
incomprehensibility of God as involved in and correlative to the
idea of the all-controlling power and knowledge of God we shall fall
into the Romanist and Arminian heresy of making the mind of man
at some point as ultimate as is the mind of God.22
Thus we see that the reality of or thodoxy, despite

Berkouwer, is that there is no orthodoxy apart from the
self-contained God. Berkouwer insists that often it is impossible
to deduce the theology logically and consequentially from the
particular philosophical assumptions. 23 But theology and
philosophy are not so easily abstracted fr om one another. And
Barths assumptions
concerning God are logically and consequentially worked out
in all his theology and are not merely philosophical but
theological assumptions as well. It is possible, when one speaks
only English to speak it both incorrectly and illogically, as
indeed all people do in varying degrees. But it is not possible
suddenly to converse in Hebrew. It is possible, when one begins
with the self-contained God in his theology, to develop that
theology illogically and inconsistently in terms of the premise.
But it is not possible, when the premise of a theology is a God
other than the self-contained God, for that theology to reveal
God other than negatively by its failure. Theologies are not
accidental; they strive to be logical and consequential. Not only
is Christian orthodoxy impossible without the self-contained
God, but it is also impossible to define any Christian doctrine
biblically apart from this premise. When all things are
impossible and inexplicable apart from the self-contained God,
this is no less true of Christian theology and its formulations.
There is no triumph possible in a structure built without a
foundaton.
NOTES
1. G. C. Berkouwer: The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth,

p. 390 (Eerdmans).
2. Ibid., p. 385.
3. Karl Barth: The Word of God and the Word of Man, p. 202f (Scribners).
4. Ibid., p. 66ff.
5. Ibid., p. 190.
6. Berkouwer, op. cit., p. 223, 243.
7. Karl Barth: Dogmatics in Outline, p. 48f. (Philosophical Library, New
York).
8. C. Van Til: review of Paul Tillich: Systematic Theology, Vol. II, pp. 93-99,
Westminster Theological Journal, Nov. 1957, Vol XX, No. 1.
9. Joseph Haroutunian: First Essay in Reflective Theology, pp. 12, 19 (Mc-
Cormick Theological Seminary).
10. H. P. Ehrenberg: Autobiography of a German Pastor, pp. 118-139 (Student
Christian Movement Press, London).
11. See also C. Van Til: Has Karl Barth become Orthodox? 1954. Reprinted
from Westminster Theological Journal May, 1954.
12. Nels Ferre: The Christian Understanding of God, p. 203 cited in C. van
Til, comments on Ferres Where Do We Go From Here in Theology? in
Religion in Life, Winter, 1955-56 issue. See also Van Til: Paul at Athens.
13. Van Tils comment, in writing on the basically subversive nature of
Barths theology, should be noted: No judgment about Barths own faith is
implied in this. But for men to depend upon the Jesus Christ of Bartb is to depend
upon themselves as inherently righteous. . . . Never in the history of the church has the
triune God been so completely and inextricably intertwined with his own creature as
he has been in modern dialectical thought. Has Karl Barth Become Orthodox p. 181.
14. C. Van Til: Christian-Theistic Evidences, 1947, p. 73.
15. C. Van Til: Apologetics, 1953, p. 5.
16. C. Van Til The Defense of the Faith, p. 25f. See also An Introduction to
Theology, 1952 ed.. Chap. XVI, The Names and Incommunicable Attributes of
God. pp. 205-224.
18. C. Van Til: Apologetics, p. 6.
19. Ibid., p. 6f.
20. Ibid., p. 7.
21. C. Van Til: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1952 ed., p. 170.
22. Ibid., p. 190, Van Til deals at length with the import of the doctrine of
Gods incomprehensibility, pp. 164-204. See also An Introduction to Theology,
vol. ii, pp. 157-167.
23. Berkouwer, op. cit., p. 386.
13.
Christology and the Void
One of the misunderstandings which plagues a high doctrine

of Christ is that adherents of a low Christology fail to see
Christ in such thinking! When Van Til, in line with Reformed
thinking, speaks of God he speaks of the ontological and
economical trinity, of God the Father, God the Son and God
the Holy Ghost. In popular thinking, and in low Christologies,
the word God is reserved to the Father, and there is an implicit
and explicit subordination which reserves a junior status and
and almost vice-presidential nature to the second and third
persons of the trinity. To speak directly of the Son and the Holy
Ghost as God runs counter to their thinking and seems almost
confusion. Such persons therefore fail to see Christ adequately
treated because for them He must be considered in
subordination to and in isolation from the trinity.
Another tendency which plagues current Christology is the
neo-orthodox thinking which ostensibly is Christocentric
because it considers the Christ of Scripture a higher universal
than the Father. Being indifferent to God-in-Himself and
concerned with God-in-relationship, and finding the deity
exhaustively revealed in relation, neo-orthodoxy centers its
focus on Christ because it has no other focus. But the Christ it
centers its attention upon is hardly recognizable. The results of
critical biblical scholarships are fully accepted. The historical
Jesus is separated from the Christ, and the Christ becomes the
universal, participation in whom constitutes the essence of
being a person and being saved. All men are lost and saved,
reprobate and elect, in terms of this correspondence. The essence
of God is revelational
165
activity, and the essence of man is faith. Hence, God must
reveal Himself and is known in the Christ, in activity, while man
must inherently believe, since such is his nature. Neo-orthodoxy
thus tends toward universalism; all men must eventually be
saved because all men are men only as they believe. Similarly,
God is God only as He reveals Himself in revelational activity,
supremely in the idea of the Christ. T hus God to be God must be
fully involved in history, become fully involved in contingency,
lay aside all his incommunicable attributes, if He has any, and
become the opposite of Himself. From liberal sources,
neo-orthodoxy has been criticized as a St. Vitus dance in
no-mans-land. Its Chr istology can be fur ther described as a
ladder in empty space, reaching from nowhere to nowhere.
Neo-orthodoxy can say God was in Christ because there was then
no God apart from Christ; in that revelational activity, God was
exhaustively pr esent. The incarnation for Barth, for example,
was Gods complete humiliation and self-sacrifice, and he can
even speak of God s uffer ing death and p erdition.
The completeness of Gods humiliation in the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ and the boundlessness of the self-sacrifice He accomplished
here, lies in His taking upon Himself as man everything which mans
rebellion against Him has made inevitablesuffering and death but
also perdition and hell, punishment in time and in eternity, in
utter disregard of the fact that this is not worthy of Him as God.
Where does God remain and what still remains His, as God, when
Gods Son has been slain on Calvary?1
Barth is unwilling to say explicitly what is implicit in this
approach, and indeed he would rebel at the logical conclusion of
his thinking. But it remains true nonetheless that if God became
exhaustively man then man can and will become exhaustively
God. Having insisted that G od must be identical with C hrist,
so that Christ is left unrelated to the ontological trinity, how
can he avoid any mans insistence that man must be identical
with God when man is elect man? More than that, the
neo-orthodox doctrine of correspondence and election tends to
this same end.
As a result, the emphasis of neo-orthodoxy on the Lordship of
Jesus Christ as opposed to the supposedly static conception of
the sovereignty of God is deceptively Christocentric and actually
anthropocentric. Christology disappears into anthropology if
the ontological trinity is removed from the picture. Christ then
becomes, not the Mediator between God and man, but the
essence of mans possibility and potentiality and at the same time
the exhaustive manifestation of a divinity involved and
enmeshed in time and having no independent existence beyond
history. Because for Barth creation is not literally true, the
Creator-creature distinction is equally not literally true, and
salvation becomes participation rather than regeneration. As
Van Til has observed, in commenting on Barths Christology,
For as God Himself descended with us into pure contingency, we

shall rise with Him into pure truth. As God in His pre-temporality
was free for us and through His virgin birth, death and burial
became contingent with us, so we shall through His
super-temporality became eternal with Him. There is now no
possible doubt for us. Our sins, that is, our pure contingency, are
now washed away. For God has borne them and is bearing them
ever, but in relationship to His resurrection always. We realize now
that we could not have sinned otherwise than in the Christ; hence we
know that, though reprobate in pure contingency, we shall be saved
by pure rationality. And what is true for one is true for all. As with
God all are buried, so with God shall all be made alive. None are
reprobate that are not reprobate in Christ. This is implied in the
balance that Barth would maintain between the super-temporality
of God as standing for pure rationality and the pre- and
post-temporality of God as together standing for pure contingency.
Keeping in balance the three ideas of Gods pre-, super- and
post-temporality, says Barth, will save us, on the one hand, from all
secularization which is systematization and, on the other hand, from
all the problematics that are inherent in the idea of pure
temporality as such. From this it appears that Barths trinitarian
form of statement is really intended to provide for the two critical
motifs of pure contingency and pure rationality, the two being kept
in balance.2
Brunner can speak of Christ becoming flesh in the sense that
flesh means the brutal solidity of the facts of sensible existence,
but it is not the traditional interpretation which assumes that
th e et er nal ent er ed th e temp or al, b ecau s e the b r eak in g
through of the eternal into time does not in an y way result
in any visible historical phenomenon. 3 This is, as Van Til
ob serves, historical relativism. Because there is no true concept
of eternity, there can be no valid concept of time; because there
is no God-in-Himself, there is no meaningful history. The
concept of a supra-historical fall leads to a supra-historical Christ,
unrelated to the ostensibly hard realities of biblical criticism.
The historical becomes only a certain superficial aspect of
reality. 4 It is thus possible to become contemporaneous and
even identical with Christ because Christ is supra-historical, and
because being is being and is not differentiated into created and
uncreated. As Van Til anal yzes this approach in Barth,
It is to get beyond the reach of all historical and speculative

relativism that Barth introduces his conception of primal history or
revelation time. Revelation time and its activity is constantly spoken
of as the opposite of systematic relationship.
Barths doctrine of the freedom of God as it finds expression in what

he says on the incarnation may again be said to be extremely
rationalistic. His very attempt to escape all forms of natural theology
marks it as such. This attempt seems at first blush to be simply
irrationalistic. It is apparently by his constant insistence on the
discontinuity of revelation time with systematic interpretation
alone that he seeks to escape consciousness theology. But back of this
lies the search for a unity that is so high as to make all other unities
subordinate to it. God cannot exist apart from His revelation in
Christ. God cannot reveal Himself in the cosmos and the mind of
man through ordinary history prior to Christ. God cannot reveal
Himself at all in histor y as such. All this is once more to say, in
effect, that the subject of which Barth speaks is the Individual, that
is reality as a whole. There can be only one such reality. This reality
has two aspects. The Father stands for the aspect of pure contingency
and the Son in his incarnation for that of pure rationality. 5
Reinhold Niebuhr is at this point more plain-spoken than
others. In speaking of the biblical concepts of resurrection and
judgment, he declares,
It is important to take biblical symbols seriously but not literally.
If they are taken literally the biblical conception of a dialectical
relation between history and superhistory is imperiled; for in that
case the fulfillment of history becomes merely another kind of
time-history. If the symbols are not taken seriously the biblical
dialectic is destroyed, because in that case concepts of an eternity are
connoted in which history is destroyed and not fulfilled.6
Unless we begin with the ontological trinity, and with the
sovereign and secret counsel of God as determinative of all
history, we destroy time and history. By attempting to avoid the
Christian concept of eternity and the ontological trinity,
neo-orthodoxy ends up refusing to accept true history, which
becomes merely time-history, and seeks refuge in the limbo of
the supra-historical, in what is neither time nor eternity, fish or
fowl, but a retreat into relativism. Christology cannot exist in
this vacuum; it becomes a disguised anthropology and an
evasion of theology, and the current demand for
Christocentric thinking is largely that.
Van Tils Christology is in line with Chalcedon and all
Christian orthodoxy. The second person of the ontological
trinity, very God of very God, became very man of very man,
but the divine and human natures were in union rather than
confusion, two natures, without confusion, without change,
without division, without separation. The reality of the
eternal and temporal are maintained. The eternal is always
independent of and prior to the temporal, but the temporal is real
because undergirded by the secret counsel of God. Because time
is real and the fall is real, the incarnation is necessary to bring
man back to God and to his responsibility as a creature created
in the image of God. The meaning of time must be seen in terms
of the plan of God, and therefore history cannot have meaning
except in terms of the counsel of God. Christ as redeemer
and mediator re-
deems man from the meaninglessness of his relativism begotten
of sin, and as mediator brings him back to his true relationship
to God. As prophet, He re-instates man in true knowledge; as
priest, He not only makes atonement and intercedes for us, but
establishes that the question of knowledge is basically an ethical
question. As king, He subdues us in order to give us true
knowledge and to establish us in our kingly role.7
Inevitably, the more clearly and fully our theology and
philosophy make their starting point in the ontological trinity of
Scripture, the more fully and clearly our dependence on the
Chalcedonian doctrine of the Christ becomes. The doctrine of
the ontological trinity requires a high Christology; it requires a
preservation of the meaning of both time and eternity and it can
do so without confusion. The ontological trinity gives validity
to both time and eternity without making them two unrelated
concepts. Where we have the neo-orthodox concept of the
individual and the unity of being, it is inevitably impossible to
maintain the old concepts of time and eternity; they become
unrelated. Philosophy and theology then wander off into three
unhappy tangents; first, only eternity is regarded as real, thereby
destroying history; second, only time is regarded as real, thus
destroying meaning and purpose and reducing all to relativism;
or, third, an attempt can be made to fuse time and eternity and
to escape their tension by resorting to a concept of supra-history.
In each of these three, no mediator is necessary; at best, Christ
becomes the Idea. There is nothing to mediate, because there
are no two kinds of being, created and uncreated, no time as
against eternity, no sovereign and self-contained God as against
the creature, man. Such Christologies begin and end in
themselves; they have no reference to either the biblical God or
biblical man, and surely none to the biblical Jesus. They operate
in an existentialist void, neither living nor dying in their
non-historical moments. The only guarantee of an adequate
and biblical Christology is a theology which begins with the
ontological trinity. And for this reason Van Tils Christology is
especially significant. For this reason also, his concept of Christ
is cosmic in scope, envisioning not merely the saving of souls
or the supra-historical moment, but the regeneration of all things
in terms of the Kingdom of God.
The ostensible purpose of the new Christology is to preserve
the meaning and validity of history; by preserving the meaning
of history, it actually means something radically different,
namely, to give priority to history or time over eternity. This is
very clearly seen, not only in the clearly neo-orthodox
theologians, but in James Daanes A Theology of Grace and
The State of Theology in the Church in the September, 1957,
Reformed Journal. Daane argues against the equal ultimacy of
election and reprobation as destructive of history and theology,
and in this is followed by Berkouwer.8 Daane believes that the
absolutely sovereign God should take time to realize his
purpose. It is not surprising that this belief follows
immediately after his objection to Gods eternal decree as a point
of departure. He speaks also of this not-yet-fully-realized aspect
of Gods purposes with respect to the elect and reprobate.9 To
give meaning to Adam and to time, Gods eternal decree, His
fully realized purposes, and His total self-consciousness must be
denied or infringed upon. Since priority is given to time over
eternity, Gods self-consciousness cannot precede mans
self-consciousness. God cannot fully realize what His purposes
for man are until man himself realizes himself. But the only way,
as we have seen, that times meaning can be preserved is in terms
of the self-contained God and His eternal decree. The attempt
to preserve history thus destroys history, since it introduces
chance, undercuts the concept of the ontological trinity, which
alone gives particularity and universality, and leads to a flight
from history itself into the void of supra-history. The new
Christologies are barren and sterile idealisms. The attempt to
make Adam independent of the divine decree is an attempt to
make man autonomous either in his being or participant in
Gods being. The whole drift is to give priority to time and
man over eternity and God; and this is neither Christian or is it
philosophically tenable.
Biblical Christology has meaning because of the eternal de-
cree; time has meaning because it does not exist in a void. A
Christology whose orientation is against the self-contained God
and His eternal decree is hardly other than anthropocentric in
meaning; to use Christology to war against the ontological
trinity is scant recommendation of Christian thinking! To use
the name of Christ to attack the triune God is strange procedure
and devious strategy. Against all this the Christology of
Christian orthodoxy, which Van Til consistently expounds, is
the one effective safeguard.
In John A. Mackay we see clearly what the new Christology
presupposes, a concept of indifferentiated being in which God,
man, and all creation participate, and salvation becomes
correspondence and participation. Jesus is thus indeed divine,
but so is man as he participates in being. As Mackay puts it,
Redemption, the participation of man in the life of God, is
thus found by the seeker to be the meaning and the goal of
biblical truth.10
Jesus Christ said, not in so many words, but by implication, that
reality is hierarchical . . . That means that you have in the universe
a graded scale of being. You have God, you have man, you have
animals, you have matter; you have also spirits, angelic and satanic.
There is an hierarchical nature of things in which true order is
achieved when the lower gives obedience to the higher.11
In terms of this, he can speak of Gods will to unity in

ecumenical Christianity, because the whole goal of the universe
is to achieve unity of being, and Jesus Christ has closed the
great rift in the universe.12 The result of all this is, both in
Mackay and in Princeton Seminary, as Van Til points out, a
vague mysticism in which God is not God, man is not man and
Christ is not Christ.13 And nothing else is possible from such a
concept of being. The only ground for the biblical doctrine of
Christ is the biblical conception of the self-contained God. The
new Christology leads directly into the void of undifferentiated
being from whence it came.
NOTES
1. Karl Barth: The Knowledge of God and the Service of God, p. 83f. (Scrib-
ners) See also Barth: Christ and Adam, Man and Humanity in Romans 5.
2. C. Van Til: The New Modernism, p. 346. It seems almost pointless to add
that the foregoing is Van Tils exposition of Barths position, not his own.
However, such a misunderstanding has been made by Berkouwer. In his De
Triomf Der Genade in de Theologie Van Karl Barth, p. 300, and in the English
edition The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, p. 391, he accuses
Van Til of a Nestorian theology. But Berkouwer bases this opinion, cited in the
original text, on a statement by Van Til in Has Karl Barth become Orthodox?
pp. 160, 162, in which he takes Van Tils statement of Barths opinion as Van
Tils own belief! It is distressing that Berkouwer should be so senstitive to a
couple of sentences in Van Til, misinterpreted, while so insensitive to volumes
in Barth!
3. E. Brunner: The Mediator, pp. 153f, 308, note, cited in Van Til, op. cit.,
p. 180f.
4. E. Brunner, Ibid., p. 162, in Van Til, Ibid., p. 182.
5. Van Til: Ibid., p. 227.
6. R. Niebuhr: The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, p. 50. (Scribners)
7. C. Van Til: The Defense of the Faith, pp. 32ff.
8. G. C. Berkouwer: The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth, p.
391 (Eerdmans).
9. Daane, op. cit., p. 25.
10. John A. Mackay: A Preface to Theology, p. 66.
11. John A. Mackay: in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Winter, 1950.
12. John A. Mackay: Gods Order, p. 82, and A Preface to Christian Theology,
p. 17, cited in C. Van Til, mss. Dimensionalism or the Word.
13. Van Til, op. cit.
14.
How Wide a Gospel?
A pertinent question at this point is, how wide a gospel do

we proclaim? Is indeed the good news for all of life? It is
customary for scholars, both Christian and non-Christian, to
respond to this question with a nostalgic look at the unified
world-view of the middle ages. That the middle ages, to a more
limited extent, however, than usually realized, did possess a
unified word-view can be granted without altering the fact that
such a unity can have little good news or gospel to it.
By making the vision of God and the contemplative life the
highest aim of life, by emphasizing the spiritual as godly and
withdrawal from the world as holy, the middle ages in a sense
surrendered the world to the devil. The world and matter were
either to be tightly governed by spirit or to be renounced, or
both. Sacerdotal celibacy was emblematic of the fact that the
kingdom of God and the common life were incompatible. The
kingdom had to be superimposed upon the world; it could
govern the world, but it could not coincide with the world.
The Reformation doctrines of justification by faith, the
priesthood of all believers, and the Christian calling and
vocation made possible the potential coincidence of the
kingdom and the world as an historical objective, not, of course,
to be fully realized in this life but to be approximated and the
proper goal of historical activity. Thus the Reformation was
liberation and the promise of life, but a promise thus far
unrealized. Why this failure? Even as Roman Catholicism has
historically absorbed local deities at times as saints, and
absorbed local goddesses into the image of the Madonna, so
Protestantism has followed a sim-
174
ilar policy with regard to secularism. It has tried to make the
world over into the kingdom by baptizing paganism and
secularism, by sprinkling a few drops of approval and
benediction over the heads of alien philosophies and
presuppositions. It has operated on the principle of common
ground rather than reconquered ground. It has borrowed its
doctrines of education from the world, its political theory from
the state, its concept of the law from Phariseeism, secularism and
Thomism. In the early 1930s, some New Deal economists
asserted that the road to prosperity and wealth was through
unlimited spending and debt. Similar reasoning seems to
prevail in many Christian circles: the more we allow the world
to prevail in the church, the stronger the church! The more we
throw away our Christian presuppositions, the more strong our
Christian strength and appeal, ostensibly! The gospel,
apparently, is not big enough or wide enough to meet the world
in its own strength; it must borrow Sauls armor.
But as Van Til asserts, It is quite impossible to challenge
the modern man with the gospel of Christ unless this gospel of
Christ be set in its widest possible setting.1 It is not our function
to cater to modern man but to challenge him, not to confirm or
baptize him in his ways but to convert him to the whole counsel
of God.
There is too little good news in much gospel preaching of
today. One of the most prominent of modern fundamentalist
preachers has declared, in defining the Christian mission as
saving souls only, You dont polish brass on a sinking ship.
Such a view is as surely a surrender of the world to the devil as
anything the middle ages produced, and the growing impotence
of such Christianity in its influence on the world scene is a
natural consequence of its theology. It is easy for the high and
mighty of the world, when it suits their purpose, to give their
blessing to such evangelism; after all, it is productive of better
citizens, and it leaves them unchallenged.
Modernism, by baptizing secularism, likewise fails. Its social
gospel is established on vaguely Christian sentiment and
sentimentality, not on clear-cut and Christian-theistic
presupposi-
tions. As a result, it can only offer issues, never faith. It seeks to
identify the kingdom with the world rather than to work for its
coincidence. And too often Calvinist thinking has followed
alien traditions rather than its own heritage.
Scholasticism seeks to superimpose a spiritual kingdom on an
alien material world. Modernism too frequently identifies the
world and the kingdom because it works on the presuppositions
of the natural man. Fundamentalism makes the kingdom purely
eschatological and stops the clock in terms of contemporary
history.
But the gospel is for all of life: the good news is precisely that
the whole of life is restored and fufilled through Jesus Christ,
that, in the counsel of God, the kingdom is destined to triumph
in every sphere of life. This gospel cannot be proclaimed and
the dominion of the kingdom extended except on Christian
presuppositions. The answer to the question, how wide a gospel
do we have, is simply this: as wide as life and creation, as wide
as time and eternity. It rests in the decree of the self-contained
and autonomous God; it is a faith grounded on a truly systematic
theology.
The purpose of Van Tils work is precisely to set the gospel of
Christ in its widest possible setting. The church will prosper in
terms of such a theology, one in which we can speak of the
triumph of God, and the whole counsel of God. In such a theology
is our strength and peace, for, as Calvin observed long ago, our
security and Gods omnipotence are equal; the former not being
less than the latter. 2
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1952 ed., p. 179.

2. John Calvin: Calvins Calvinism, trans, by Henry Cole, A Treatise on the
Eternal Predestination of God, 1950 ed., p. 54. (Eerdmans)
APPENDICES
1.
The Sons of Leah
Lest there be any misunderstanding, it is perhaps best to

note that, although the sons of Leah were never loved by Jacob
in the same way as Rachels sons, it does not mean that they were
reprobate, and the analogy is misunderstood if such is the
conclusion. They were sons of the unloved wife; they showed
in their lives the rift between Jacob and Leah. Jacob was
suspicious of them up to his going into Egypt, and his dying
words reflect no credit to some of them. Some may, and some
may not, have been reprobate; that is not our concern.
The point of the analogy is this: even as Jacob unwittingly
embraced a bride who was not his choice, with unhappy
consequences, so well-meaning Christian thinkers have
unknowingly reasoned on premises they assumed to be
Christian. They were not aware that their Rachel was Leah.
Augustine, a truly great Christian thinker, nevertheless
introduced alien strands into Christian thought by reasoning at
times from Greek rather than Christian premises, without
realizing his inconsistency. And it remains a constant
temptation in every generation to use common and
non-Christian presuppositions without an awareness of their
contradiction to Christian presuppositions. Moreover, the
analogy points further to the conscious and perverse embracing
of Leah and the insistence that she is Rachel. Some
contemporary thinkers self-consciously attempt to reason from
non-Christian premises and are insistent that these are identical
with Christian presuppositions or else can lead to
Christian-theistic conclusions. They embrace Leah and call her
Rachel. They posit, for example, the God of existentialism
and insist that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
179
2.
Van Til and Amsterdam
It was with sadness that Paul observed, For they are not all
Israel, which are of Israel (Rom. 9:6). With similar sadness it
must be observed that they are not all of Amsterdam who are
of Amsterdam.
What then does Amsterdam stand for? Calvinism had for some
years been steadily on the decline; its defeat was all the more
telling in that the intellectual calibre of Presbyterian and
Reformed scholars was so clearly outstanding. The church by
and large, however, increasingly rejected Calvinism, and the
apologetics of these scholars had a declining impact and
audience. In America, for example, the intellectual
preeminence of the Calvinist scholars at Princeton was obvious,
and there is no denying the greatness of its history to 1929. But
that tradition, so richly appreciated by Van Til, nevertheless had
as its assumption the belief that the natural man was able to do
two things:
a. to work up a natural theology that would show theism to be more
probably true than any other theory of reality, and
b. to show that Christianity is more probably true than any other
theory of sin and redemption.1
Behind this assumption lay two deadly presuppositions, first, the
autonomy of the natural man, who could act as judge over
reality, and, second, the impartiality of the natural man, who
was expected to assess honestly an interpretation he was in
war against. Calvin had emphasized the perversity of the
natural mans reasoning and its vicious partiality; Calvinism
could not produce an adequate apologetics with the
presuppositions of the natural man. To expect man, the
covenant-breaker, to be
180
impartial with regard to factuality is like expecting a thief to
sit impartially as judge and jury over himself. And against this
approach Abraham Kuyper rebelled, because it assumed the
validity of two ultimate and mutually exclusive principles, the
autonomy of natural man and the sovereignty of the
self-contained God. Kuyper set out therefore to rid apologetics
and Christian philosophy of these two mutually exclusive
ultimates and to establish Christian thought on the firm basis
of the ontological trinity. This he did to an amazing and
revolutionary decree, recalling Calvinism to its biblical
presuppositions and to Calvins premises. That at various
points inconsistencies remained in Kuyper is not surprising,
but the unquestionable direction in Kuyper is clearly to
eliminate the contradiction. These inconsistencies, however,
have been appealed to by champions of the older apologetics,
such as Ridderbos and Masselink, in support of their position,
while in Bavinck we have a further emphasis and development
of Kuypers position.
Despite bitter opposition, the Amsterdam view has flourished
and has as its leading European figures today D. H. Th.
Vollenhoven and H. Dooyeweerd, both professors of the Free
University of Amsterdam, and in America, Van Til. The impact
of this school has been more extensive outside the church
circles and schools than within, and Dooyeweerd can speak of
the rise of a circle, though it be still modest, of scientific
adherents, each of whom endeavors in his own department to
make the newly developed philosophy fruitful.2
It is not our concern here to delineate the various facets of
thought in these men but to point to their common effort to
bring human thinking to epistemological self-consciousness and
to lay bare the religious presuppositions of all thought. They
are Calvinists and regard Calvinism as Christianity come into
its own, as fully self-consistent and true to its biblical faith. The
Amsterdam position is being developed in the history of
philosophy of history by K. J. Popma, in sociology by H. Van
Riessen, and in other fields by other men. Van Til, in the
philosophy of religion and in apologetics, has developed these
same principles.
His own syllabus on The Metaphysics of Apologetics was written
prior to Vollenhovens publication of The Necessity of a
Christian Logic or Methodology, but on the whole Van Til has
been slower in publishing than the men of Amsterdam. His
relative isolation in America, and the heavy burden of teaching
and extensive lecturing, as well as his insistence on a very
extensive research of contemporary and past studies in each field,
have limited his writing, which, it is to be hoped, will now be
more frequent.
There has been no attempt to challenge the basic premise of
this school of thought, namely, that two mutually exclusive
ultimates cannot exist. The common attack on this school, as in
Hacketts criticism of Van Til and all metaphysical
presuppositionalism, is an insistence that common ground does
exist between the two ultimates. Hackett remarks that
unbelievers, like Christians, apprehend their experience as
rational: what they fail to do is to carry through this
apprehension to its highest explanation in the affirmation of
Gods reality. There is a basic epistemological structure
common to all minds as rational and with a common world of
facts.3 This to Hackett is a better starting point, in that it
provides neutral ground, than that of presuppositionalism. The
first and most basic assertion of presuppositionalism is that one
must start with the assumption that the God who has spoken in
Scripture is the true God. Such an approach lands one
ultimately in an extreme Calvinist atmosphere, hardly
desirable surroundings, apparently, as compared to common
ground with natural man.4 All men have reason in common and
the same facts to deal with; their problem is inconsistency rather
than radical hostility. Unless the world is what the natural man
says it is, there can be no reasoning possible, it is held. Hackett
wants to hold to mans freedom and rationality in a void, as
though they could exist in themselves and give independent
witness to factuality and the nature of things. There is a
tenacious refusal to face up to the fact that two mutually
exclusive ultimates are presupposed.
The barren and sterile re-assertions of the traditional Ar-
minian position are as commonplace as they are ineffectual.
Its axioms of autonomy and common rationality are held to
be universally binding and beyond criticism. But, as
Dooyeweerd has observed,
. . . it is also not permissible to handle the so-called autonomy of
philosophic thought as a theoretical axiom which could escape
from a transcendental critique. This latter does not require
indeed that anybody should abandon this autonomy as a
postulate. Its sole requirement is that such a postulate
should be perused in its true nature and that it should not pass
for a criterion of scientific character.6
The axioms of natural man are prejudices based on and ruled
by a basic-prejudice, that turns out to have no philosophical
character at all, and that should be unmasked by a real
transcendental criticism of philosophical thought.6 The
resistance to this examination and the unwillingness to face up
to the question of presuppositions is not surprising; man resists
the implications of his position and the consequences of
epistemological self-consciousness. But he cannot evade them.
NOTES

2. H. Dooyeweerd: A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, vol. I, p. vii
(Presbyterian and Reformed).
3. S. C. Hackett: The Resurrection of Theism, p. 167 (Moody Press).
4. Ibid., pp. 158, 174.
5. H. Dooyeweerd: Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought, p. 22ff
6. Ibid., p. 20f.
3.
Bishop Butlers Analogy
In Bishop Butlers Analogy the Thomistic principle of the

ability of the natural man by a reasonable use of reason to
attain to the truth of the Christian religion was revived and
given its classic Protestant formulation, one determinative of
most subsequent apologetics. Reason is regarded as arbiter and
judge over the meaning, morality and evidence of revelation
and of Scripture. As a result of the analysis of the evidences,
Aquinas and Butler both conclude that God probably exists. In
the alpha and omega of this methodology, human
self-consciousness is assumed to be autonomous, capable of
sitting in judgment over God and His revelation, and
intelligible without reference to God as Creator and interpreter.
The conspicuous fact in such thinking is its failure to see man
as creature or to take seriously the Creator-creature
relationship and its implications. If their thinking is true, God
is irrelevant to the human situation because He is neither
creator nor determiner of things but only a common participant
in being and history. It assumes also the impartiality and
neutrality of man the covenant-breaker. As a result,
apologetics based on such an approach fail to present more
than a probable God who is a pale shadow and imitation of the
God of Scripture no matter how well intentioned its hopes and
how Calvinistic its theology. The old Princeton method of
apologetics was largely indebted to Butler, who in turn was
indebted to Thomas Aquinas.
Van Tils syllabus on Christian-Theistic Evidences (1947)
explores the fallacy of this position thoroughly. As he points
out, facts and interpretation of facts cannot be separated. It is
im-
184
possible even to discuss any particular fact except in relation to
some universal.1 Butler distinguishes between probable and
demonstrative evidences, probable evidences leading from mere
presumption to moral certainty, and demonstrative evidences
giving immediate and absolute certainty. Butler believed
Christianity to be probably true. According to his outlook,
reason could determine What we should expect from a wise,
just, and good Being, and, having determined that, proceed
then to see if such a God is presented in Scripture or appears in
nature. Thus, Butler declared himself ready to give up Scripture
or any part of it, but let reason be kept to. However, by
beginning with his concept of what reason must expect, he found
himself inevitably interpreting all reality in terms of that
expectation and finding a certainly probable God in his own
reasons image. As Van Til has pointed out, Butler does
suppose that the Author of Nature exists because he thinks
rational argument will reasonably establish Gods existence. But,
in his methodology, he ignores that which he supposes, as
though this were possible. He assumes a world of brute
factuality, without order or meaning, and then assumes that an
autonomous and unrelated reason is capable of establishing a
world which cannot exist on his assumption of autonomy.
What meaning then is there in the idea that we suppose an
Author of nature? Are we not then for all practical purposes
ignoring Him? In other words, if there is a God presupposed should
not that presupposition control our reasoning? And in that case
can we be empiricists in our method of argument?2
This empiricism quickly found its end result in Humes

skepticism. As Van Til has clearly stated, Butler appealed to
brute fact. To brute fact Hume forced him to go. 3 If he
reasoned from brute factuality, he could not assume the facts he
intended to prove; if he began as an empiricist, he could not at
his convenience assume a priori ideas to hold his empirical data
together in some convenient universal. Hume as the more
consistent empiricist forced the issue, and the apologetics of
Aquinas and Butler cannot escape the alternative he compels
such apologetics to face. For Hume the basic concept of thought
is bare possibility, while for one who holds to an Author of
Nature the basic concept of thought should be Gods complete
rationality. Butler failed to see this basic alternative. 4
Consistent empiricism leads to an infinite number of possibilities,
which cancel every infinite number of probabilities, as Van Til
has shown. Neither could Butler fall back on a non-Chris tian
a priorism, because it leads to the same end result.
Those who seek to prove the existence of God by an a priori

argument of the non-Christian sort, prove too much. If they prove
the necessary existence of God, they also prove the necessary
existence of everything else that exists. The necessary existence of
God is said to be implied in the finite existence of man. That is
taken to mean, in effect, that necessary existence is a correlative to
relative existence. But this in turn implies that relative existence is a
correlative to necessary existence. Thus God comes into existence
by the hypostatization of man. Temporal things together with the
evil in them are then taken as correlative to God. This is destructive
of Gods unchangeability. God as well as man is in this way made
subject to change. Thus we are back at chance as the most
fundamental concept in philosophy. A priori reasoning on
non-Christian assumptions, no less than a posteriori reasoning upon
non-Christian assumptions, leads to the apotheosis of chance and
thus to the destruction of predication.5
The apologetics of Thomas Aquinas and of Butler and their

followers have had their natural consequences and development
into unhappy conclusions. Yet they flourish, not in philosophical
success, but in a continuing appeal to new generations of
thinkers. The reason is an obvious one. Arminianism can seek no
other foundation and must try to find some kind of security in
its untenable position. Within the Roman Catholic Church
Thomism can hold sway by an official decree which arrests its
development; within Arminian Protestantism, without papal
fiat, an arrested development is the order of the day. To begin
with a consistently Christian position, to begin with the
presupposition
that the God of Scripture is the true God, has, as Hackett
observes, unhappy consequences, landing one in an extreme
Calvinist atmosphere.6 It is apparently better to avoid God and
Calvinism than to resist the abysmal reaches of impossible
probabilities. Thus Arminian apologetics continue, not in
spite of their defects, but because of them.
In terms of this, modernist theology has been more honest to
its assumptions in following Kantian and existentialist thinking
than has been fundamentalism in remaining with Butler. If
Thomas Aquinas and Butler are right, then man had better
make the most of his autonomy, make himself the measure of
reality and declare that only to be significantly real which he
himself can categorize.
There is only one absolutely true explanation of every fact and of
every group of facts in the universe. God has this absolutely true
explanation of every fact. Accordingly, the various hypotheses that
are to be relevant to the explanation of phenomena must be
consistent with this fundamental presupposition. God is the
presupposition of the relevancy of any hypothesis.7
But even modernist theology, having followed Kant, is unwilling
to be honest in its claim to autonomy. The biblical terminology,
especially with neo-orthodoxy, must be borrowed to cloak the
wolf of brute factuality. And again this is not surprising.
Epistemological self-consciousness is the onrushing direction of
history, bitterly resisted at every step and yet forced ahead by the
very resistance to it. And, in the face of this, every attempt to
return to the arrested development of Aquinas and Butler
becomes more irrelevant to the history of apologetics.
NOTES
1. C. Van Til: Christian-Theistic Evidences, p. i.

2. Ibid., p. 9.
3. Ibid., p. 22.
4. Ibid., p. 23.
5. Ibid., p. 27.
6. G. C. Hackett: The Resurrection of Theism, p. 158, 174 (Moody Press).
7. C. Van Til, op. cit., p. 63.
4.
By What Standard?
The crisis of present history is the collapse of the doctrine of

man prevalent in Western culture since the Renaissance, a
concept that has established itself not only in Europe and North
America, but is increasingly prevalent throughout the world.
This doctrine, declaring man to be the measure of all things, has
reduced man from the biblical doctrine of man created in the
image of God, to man, the economic animal. One of the
un-happiest aspects of this crisis is the increasing irrelevance of
the Christian church and of theology to the growing crisis of
man. The church has been speaking for countless generations,
but it becomes increasingly obvious that the church has been
talking to itself. This situation has been especially discernible in
Reformed circles. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
Reformed theology has for many generations been indulging in
a monologue which has no outside listeners, has been playing a
game of solitaire, and has been increasingly isolated from all
contacts with the world. Why this irrelevance of theology, why
this isolation of Reformed thought? Why the increasing
indifference of the world to theology, and, to an extent, an
indifference of theology to the world?
To a great measure the crisis of modern man, as well as the
crisis of theology, can be traced to a lack of an adequate standard.
The concept of economic man has collapsed because man has
found it an inadequate standard for life. Man cannot live by
bread alone, and the increasing ferment of modern society is a
witness to this truth. In those areas where economic man has
been most triumphant, as in modern American culture, dissatis-
188
faction, restlessness and a disturbed mentality increasingly
witness to his impotence and to the recognition that he cannot
live by bread alone. Modern secular man has found himself to
be without a standard. On the other hand, theology has lacked a
standard in evaluating the situation, and has demonstrated its
lack of a basic concept for understanding the world in its
increasing irrelevance and impotence in dealing with those
problems posed by sociology, biology, philosophy, and every
aspect and sphere of contemporary life. Therefore, the basic
question is this, by what standard shall we understand our
present situation? By what standard shall we approach modern
man? By what standard shall we approach the problems of
contemporary life? By what standard shall theology govern
itself?
This problem is one of particular pertinence to me, inasmuch
as this problem was one which plagued my thinking in my
undergraduate days. It was not a lack of a Christian background,
nor a lack of knowledge of the Scriptures, but a lack of theology
and theological direction that made me helpless in the face of
the contemporary scene. In the course of my thinking, it was the
book of Job that gave direction to my theology. The book of
Job made me a Calvinist. The book of Job made clear to
me by what standard we must understand the whole of life.
The book of Job therefore is of significance to our contemporary
scene because it deals precisely with this problem of standard, of
measure, of yardstick or rule whereby man shall understand.
In the book of Job we find a problem which is commonplace
in human experience. While what is posed for us in the book of
Job is a particular and special test of the man Job, yet the
experience therein can be duplicated in the lives of countless
men. Many a godly man has been afflicted as Job was afflicted,
has seen his lifes work dissolved by catastrophe, has seen the
wicked prosper while he has been brought low, humbled and
destroyed, has cried out with Job in agony of spirit and
bitterness and wondered at the ways of God that permitted such
things to come to pass. The conclusion that Job reached
therefore, whereby he understood the standard of God in
dealing with himself and
with all men, becomes especially relevant to our generation.
When Job was first laid low, found himself stripped of all his
possessions, his family destroyed, and he himself sick both in
body and soul, his immediate reaction was one of faith, Naked
came I out of my mothers womb, and naked shall I return
thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed
be the name of the Lord. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged
God foolishly (Job 1:21,22). Subsequently, as Jobs wife saw
his sickness and his utter misery, her summation of the situation
was blunt and direct. Dost thou still retain thine integrity?
curse God, and die. But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one
of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at
the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did
not Job sin with his lips (Job 2:9,10).
Thus we find Job in a situation not uncommon in history, a
situation which might better be termed commonplace, and we
find him accepting Gods will with faithwith faith, but not with
understanding. The conversations of Job with his friends reveal a
passionate faith, an unswerving trust in God, but together with
it, a lack of comprehension. Why had God dealt with him so?
Wherein is the justice of God? Again, we find in Jobs three
friends faith but no understanding. There is much that is to be
commended in the discourses of the friends of Job, much that
reveals faith and insight, but the basic lack of understanding
of the standard of God, the standard by which man must discern
all things, is lacking, and in that lack is the basic conflict between
Job and his friends. The three friends argued with Job that
affliction is always a result of sin. Job was disturbed by this very
question, Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?
Job found it difficult to understand why a righteous God
permitted a righteous man to suffer grievously. Not
uncommonly we find men protesting against the course of
world history on the grounds that the course of history
represents the triumph of evil. During the course of World War I,
the dramatic critic William Archer declared that if there were a
God, there could be no war. He challenged the existence and
the righteousness of any
God who existed by pointing to the horrors of that war. His
question was easily answered: the wages of sin are and have been
and will remain, death. The sinful hopes of man are constantly
frustrated; such is the plan and providence of God. The course
of history is what it is precisely because there is a God of justice.
Man cannot live unto himself, with all the profligacy history
reveals, and expect to reap anything except the whirlwind, and
the course of human history reveals that the stars in their course
fought against Sisera and continue to fight against every tyrant,
against every nation, every people whose course is heedless of
justice and heedless of God and man. It is not wars nor
economic disasters nor the great movements of history that are
a problem to faith. Such things are a verification of our faith in
that they witness to the reality of the wages of sin and to the fact
of consequence. What does constitute a problem to faith is the
problem of Job: why do the righteous suffer, why do good
people lose their only son in the course of a war, a godly son;
why are poor widows oppressed and robbed; why the just men
abused, turned out of office and publicly shamed for sins not
their own; why do the righteous suffer? Jobs suffering therefore
brought to the fore in his mentality a basic theological issue
which is relevant in every age: how shall we understand the
works of God; by what standard shall the course of human
events be understood?
Jobs immediate reaction was to bewail his birth. He cursed
the day in which he was born, expressed the wish that he had not
been born or had been an abortion, and declared that for himself
life was only a curse. Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered Job
reprovingly, Behold, thou has instructed many, and thou hast
strengthened the weak hand . . . But now it is come upon thee,
and thou faintest; it toucheth thee, and thou art troubled . . .
Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or
where were the righteous cut off? (Job 4:3,5,7). Shall mortal
man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his
maker? Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he
charged with folly. How much less in them that dwell in houses
of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before
the moth? (Job 4:17-19). Eliphaz further declared that
Affliction cometh not forth from the dust, neither doth trouble
spring out of the ground (Job 5:6). I would seek unto God, and
unto God would I commit my cause (Job 5:8). Eliphaz asserted
the principle of causality; afflictions do not come out of the dust
nor troubles spring out of the ground; in other words, they are
not purposeless, causeless, meaningless. There is in all of life a
strict causality, and he pleads with Job to look into his past and
to understand that there must be a particular cause as a result of
which God has punished him. Men are all sinners, Eliphaz
declares, and perhaps Job has a special sinfulness, some secret
rebellion, which has merited this particular judgm ent of God.
With Eliphazs premise that this is a world of causality, we can
all agree. At no point is Eliphaz clearly in the wrong in any of
his observations; on the contrary, his analysis is an analysis of
faith and manifests a belief in a universe governed by law, and
yet the essence of Jobs plight is completely missed by Eliphaz.
Job answers in considerable anguish and distress of spirit. He
feels that clearly all that has occurred to him is from God. For
the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof
drinketh up my spirit (Job 6:4). Both Job and his three friends
are in complete agreement that God is the absolute sovereign,
that all events have their origin in the will of God. We might
declare that the basic theology of all the persons involved is
Reformed or Calvinist, in that the sovereignty of God is clearly
acknowledged by every one of them and the divine causality
recognized in all events. Behind all second causes they see the
hand of God and the providence of God.
But Job protests against this activity of God declaring, Am I
a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me? (Job 7:12).
Am I a menace to human society? Am I a menace to the purposes
of God that this special vengeance must be exacted upon me?
Job does not question his own sinfulness, I have sinned; what
shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? why hast thou set
me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself? (Job
7:20). Job therefore recognizes that he is a sinner as all men are.
He recognizes that his righteousness is of God; he recognizes the
hand of God in all events. His problem is this: why this particular
judgment against himself; why should the righteous suffer; by
what standard shall he understand these activities of God? Bildad
the Shuhite speaks bluntly against Jobs questionings, Doth
God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice?
(Job 8:3). If thou were pure and upright; surely now he would
awake for thee, and make the habitation of thy righteousness
prosperous (Job 8:6). Behold, God will not cast away a perfect
man, neither will he help the evil doers (Job 8:20). Bildads
premise is clear cut; the Lord cannot be unjust; therefore, man
is at fault. Either Job is righteous or God is righteous, and
because God cannot be declared unrighteous, therefore Job is at
fault, Job is unrighteous. Against this argument, Job feels
helpless: I know it is so of a truth: but how should man be just
with God? (Job 9:1). He sees the majesty and the sovereignty of
God which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the
chambers of the south. Which doeth great things past finding out;
yea, and wonders without number" (Job 9:9,10). If I justify
myself, mine own mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect,
it shall also prove me perverse . . . This is one thing, therefore I
said it, He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked . . . The earth is
given into the hand of the wicked: he covereth the faces of the
judges thereof; if not, where, and who is he? (Job 9:20,22,24).
Job does not challenge the righteousness of God. The question
he raises is, how shall we understand the works of God; how
shall we understand the purposes of God; how shall we
understand history? God indeed is just, and if a man dare justify
himself against God, his own mouth shall condemn him. But,
Job insists, one thing remains obvious: while God punishes and
destroys the wicked, He also punishes and destroys the righteous.
There seems to be no standard of discrimination between the
two. Job calls attention to that fact which is so obvious to all
thinking men: the wicked do at times suffer and are punished,
but as many godly and righteous men suffer as the wicked.
History is a trail of tears shed by righteous men, godly men
whose all was stripped from
them. The pages of history have been bloodied by martyrs, by
humble saints who have been subjected to treatment of an
unspeakable nature, whose lives and possessions have been a
prey to the evil. Jobs problem is a real one, and only the
theological syllogism of his friends prevented them from seeing
it.
Job therefore raised the question: what difference is there in
being good and evil, in being righteous and in being wicked?
If I sin, then thou markest me, and thou wilt not acquit me
from mine iniquity. If I be wicked, woe unto me; and if I be
righteous, yet will I not lift up my head. I am full of confusion
(Job 10:14,15). The confusion of Job therefore is a critical one.
What difference is there between the righteous and the
unrighteous? What difference does it make to a man in the course
of his life when both are alike treated by God, apparently
without respect to their condition? Jobs challenge was
scandalous to his friends. Zophar, the Nasmathite, asks,
Should a man full of talk be justified? . . . Canst thou by
searching find out God? canst thou find out the Almighty unto
perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper
than hell; what canst thou know? . . . For vain man would be
wise, though man be born like a wild asss colt (Job 11:2,7,8,12).
Zophar again challenges Jobs righteousness, summons him to
confession and to godliness, declaring that, if his life be pure,
thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee afraid; yea, many
shall make suit unto thee (Job 11:19). Zophars doctrine is
commonplace in our generation. It is an evasion of the
intellectual problem in the name of faith. Zophar refuses to
accept the challenge of ascertaining by what standard we shall
understand the problems of life and the problem of evil and
declare instead that all these things must be taken in ignorant
faith, that, since man is incapable of finding out the Almighty to
perfection, therefore there must be no attempt to find out any of
the Almightys ways, no attempt at any kind of intellectual
understanding of the problems of theology. Against such
wisdom Job rightfully protests. Again he poses the problem, The
tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are
secure (Job 12:6). Job poses the
problem of evil and sharpens the problem by asserting the
sovereignty of God. But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach
thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: or speak to
the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall
declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand
of the Lord hath wrought this? (Job 12:7-9). There is a problem
of evil precisely because God is sovereign, and, because there is a
problem of evil, and the problem so basic to the everyday life of
mankind, an intellectual answer must be forthcoming. This
answer is not a substitute for faith but a necessity for any faith
which holds to the sovereignty of God.
Job makes his faith absolutely clear. Though he slay me, yet
will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before
him (Job 13:15). Job never claims perfection or sinlessness, but
he does challenge God to make known why he has been the
subject of such special vengeance, why evil in such special force
has been unleashed against him. He asserts clearly the doctrine
of original sin: Who can bring a clean thing out of an
unclean? not one (Job 14:4). Thus Job sees clearly the basic
theological issue without slighting the doctrine of the
sovereignty of God.
There follows then a further round of arguments in which the
friends of Job attempt again to restate the syllogism that, since
God is righteous, Job must be at fault; therefore Job suffers
because of a particular sinfulness on his part. Job again admits
that he is a sinner, as are all men, but he insists that humanly
speaking he is not worse but better than most.
Into this situation another argument is injected by a young
man, Elihu, who declares that he had previously refrained from
speaking because of his youth. With the typical impatience of
youth, he sets aside the arguments of his elders, only to restate in
essence their position. He misunderstands Jobs position by
declaring, I have heard the voice of thy words, saying, I am
clean without transgression, I am innocent; neither is there
iniquity in me... Behold, in this thou art not just: I will answer
thee, that God is greater than man (Job 33:8,9,12). Elihus
solution to the problem is in part this, namely, that all suffering
is not always
punishment for sin, that it is often remedial, sent by God to
strengthen and purify his sons. Lo, all these things worketh
God oftentimes with man, To bring back his soul from the pit,
to be enlightened with the light of the living (Job 33:29,30).
Again, as in the case of Jobs three friends, the doctrine is true
enough. But true doctrine is not a cure-all which can be applied
to every situation. A good medicine is not applicable to every
illness; penicillin is not the answer to cavities in teeth. Indeed,
Hebrews 12:8 declares that if we are not disciplined by God
then are ye bastards and not sons. But is this concept applicable
to all situations? If, for example, we fall from a tree, and,
breaking our neck, perish, have we learned a lesson which is of
value? Can this be called an action whereby God manifests His
discipline, His chastening? What educational value can such
an action have? What educational or disciplinary value is there
in any event that destroys people; that robs them of their
wherewithal, that leaves them completely stripped and helpless?
That much of Gods dealings with us are disciplinary, there can
be no doubt, but to apply this concept to the problem of evil is
evasive. Thus the friends of Job and Elihu all gave pious and
good advice, but their advice was not applicable in this
particular case. The answer to the problem is given, not by any
of the friends of Job, but by the Lord Himself, answering Job out
of the whirlwind: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words
without knowledge? Gird up thy loins like a man; for I will
demand of thee and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I
laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast
understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou
knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon
are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner
stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the
sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:2-7). God here declares
that the heavens and the earth were created before Job, that
Gods creative purpose transcends the life of Job and the
purposes of Job, that Job cannot expect that Gods providence
move in terms of himself when not only the creation but the
Creator has priority over Job.
As the Lord continues to answer Job, He speaks of causing it
to rain on the earth where no man is, on the wilderness, wherein
there is no man; to satisfy the desolate and waste land; and to
cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth (Job 28:26,27).
This is a subtle and yet significant point: this in fact is the central
point that God is making against Job. Rain falls on the earth,
not for the purposes of man, but for the purposes of God. It rains
where there is no man, and the bud of the tender herb springs
forth in places far beyond the eye and the will of man. The
functions and the purposes of nature thus transcend the life and
the will of man, and if nature transcends man in her functioning,
how much more does the Almighty transcend man in His
purpose and in His will. The Lord further declares, Will the
unicorn (or the wild ox) be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy
crib? Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?
or will he harrow the valleys after thee? (Job 39:9,10). Let us
assume for a moment that Job had bound the wild ox to his
purpose, or let us look for a moment at the oxen in the stables
of Jobs estate: does the wild ox in the hills or the ox in Jobs
stable have the right to declare that the purposes of God are evil
because they themselves lack their freedom? Because the wild
ox no longer has his pasture and the ox in the stall must leave
his hay to go out and pull the plow at the bidding of a servant,
is the nature of things out of joint? Because the ox must leave
his hay or an ass is unjustly beaten, is God unjust? Is the purpose
of God to be challenged when an animal finds itself frustrated?
The question therefore is the basic one: by what standard can
we judge? Can the will of either the wild ox or Job be the
standard by which God is judged? Can we ever assume that
anything in creation, that any created being, can declare that
the frame of things is out of joint if their own purpose and their
own will is frustrated? I too have suffered, not always justly: is
God unjust because I suffer? Is the purpose of God evil because
Job is stripped of all his possessions and his family? What is the
purpose of creation, what is the standard whereby all things are
to be judged, what is the yardstick, the rule of all things? God
chal-
lenges Job, declaring, Were you there when I created all
things? What was the purpose of creation? Is it the chief
purpose of God to glorify man and to enjoy him forever? Or is
it the chief purpose of man to glorify God and enjoy Him
forever? The yardstick, Job, declares the Lord, is not your
purpose. You have no right to rule things out of court as
purposeless or as unjust in terms of their relationship to you,
because you are not the yardstick. You cannot say, because things
affect me thus and so, therefore the whole frame of things is out
of joint. Not Job but the Lord is the yardstick. And the only
yardstick by which things in heaven and earth can be judged is
the Lord and His purpose, the ontological trinity, the Sovereign
God in Himself. Thus what God required of Job was that he
recognize His sovereignty in every respect, recognize that the
only standard for judging his own personal life and his own
problems was not in terms of himself but in terms of the
sovereignty of God, in terms of the Triune God in Himself. Job
could not declare of any event in the course of his life that this
thing was wrong because it impressed and affected him
adversely, since all events in the life of Job could only be
judged in terms of one standard, the purpose of the sovereign
God. When Job acknowledged these things to be true, the Lord
blessed the latter end of Job more than the former.
Thus there is no understanding of the problem of evil, or any
problem that confronts man, from the man-centered point of
view. Job and his friends all agreed on the doctrine of the
sovereignty of God, but they were inconsistent in their faith in
that they approached the problem of evil from a man-centered
point of view. They declared that Gods dealings were to be
determined in terms of man, that mans justice or injustice, that
mans sin or his righteousness was the determining fact in the
course of events and that therefore consequence, causality, was
to be understood merely in terms of mans inner life. God
declared such thinking to be fallacious and insisted that the only
valid standard is a God-centered standard; that no problem, the
problem of evil or any other problem, is understandable except
in
terms of a God-centered rule, a God-centered theology. By what
standard, what measure, what yardstick, therefore, shall we
understand the problems of our day, the problems of theology,
the problems of our church life? The book of Job gives us a
clear-cut answer. There is no hope except in a God-centered
theology. By what standard? The Tr iune God in Himsel f.
We have seen that Job and his three friends shared alike in a
faith in the sovereignty of God, but, as they faced the problems
of their day intellectuall y, they were incapable of applying the
the sovereignty of God practically to their problems but began
instead with the problem of evil viewed from a man-centered
position. They made no surrender of the sovereignty of God
ostensibly, but in actual practice a man-centered approach
involves a surrender of that sovereignty. The decline of
Calvinism can be understood in similar terms. Calvinism has
proved again and again in time of testing to be a failure.
Repeatedly Calvinist churches have collapsed, have drifted into
Modernism or have disappeared from the chur ch scene. The
decline of Calvinism in America has been typical of this
development. In the main Presbyterian bodies, the U.S.A., the
U.S. and the United Presb yterian churches, the Refor med
tradition was clear and unmistakable: the Westminster
Confession of Faith, the Catechism, taught and believed, and yet
these churches lost their clearly Calvinist character. The
Presb yterian church in the U.S.A., the church of Hodge,
Alexander and Warfield, is today neo-orthodox in its theology,
and any honest analysis of that situation will lead to the
recognition that the seeds of decay are to be found in the very
theologies of some of the most notable Calvinists in the
Princetonian tradition. In faith they were clearly Reformed, men
of scholarship, men of consecration, men to be respected, and
yet in their intellectual application of their faith they went
astray in that they attempted to meet the challenge of the natural
man b y beginning on common ground, b y beginning with the
assumptions of human reason; they tried to fight Goliath with
Sauls armor and they lost, because Goliath is fought only b y the
Lords power and the Lords might.
It is precisely to this situation that Cornelius Van Til
addresses himself with his rigourously Calvinist philosophy of
religion. It is an intellectual development of the implications
of a Calvinist faith. Historically, Calvinism has asserted itself
theologically and surrendered itself philosophically. This
position of surrender has unhappily been termed Calvinist
philosophy and has prevailed in virtually every sphere of life. It
manifests itself now in the criticisms of Van Til; unhappily these
criticisms were most severe in the Calvin Forum. As one who
through the years subscribed to the Forum hoping to find therein
a standard borne by Calvinism against the errors of the day, I
found it especially distressing. The Calvin Forum has been weak
through the years in its critique of the heresies of modern man,
in its critique of modernism, socialism, communism, atheism,
and in its critique of modern mans insistence on the autonomy
of his reason. On the one occasion that the Calvin Forum has
spoken out clearly and sharply it has been against Van Til,
revealing thereby its own defect and manifesting that it has been
touched at a sore spot in its own life. The nature of this attack on
Van Til is also clearly seen in James Daanes A Theology of Grace.
Chapter 7, entitled, The Ontological Trinity, Van Tils basic
principle of interpretation, witnesses to the fact indeed that
Van Til is philosophically Calvinist in that his basic principle of
interpretation is the ontological Trinity, that not only does Van
Til by faith hold to the sovereignty of God but philosophically
makes the Triune God, the Ontological Trinity, the starting
point of all Christian philosophy. Yet against this James Daane,
an ostensible Calvinist, protests, writing, Why does he himself
select one aspect of God and exalt it to the highest principle of
interpretation for every problem? . . . The mere recognition of
the Trinity as a concrete universal does not provide a Christian
principle of interpretation. Van Til overlooked this rather
obvious fact when he selected not Gods grace nor any other of
Gods virtues, nor all of Gods virtues, nor Christ Himself, but
the one-many principle as his highest principle of interpretation
for any and all of the problems of history. Any theology that
demands that the principle of interpretation be one or all of
Gods virtues establishes value as ultimate rather than the
ontological Trinity. And any theology that seeks as its basic
principle of interpretation Christ rather than the Triune God
seeks to reduce God to His relationship to man rather than to
establish God in Himself as the basic principle of interpretation.
Existentialism denies God in Himself, the ontological Trinity,
and recognizes God only in His relationship to man, and any
adequate critique of existentialism must begin with the
ontological Trinity.
Daane does two things which clearly reveal his basic hostility
to Reformed doctrine. He denies that Gods counsel includes
double predestination, that is, both reprobation and election.
God only elects; He does not decree reprobation. Thus, God
does not determine all things. The sovereignty of God is thereby
set aside. Next, Daane insists that Adam had the freedom, in an
ultimate and final sense, to obey or to disobey Gods
commandment. The conclusion is obvious: Gods sovereignty
is limited in order to make Adams freedom absolute. This is
the doctrine of autonomous man, more dangerous in
theological dress than in its obvious honesty in the
existentialism of Sartre.
All of Van Tils critics hope to meet the unbelief of modern
man by seeking common ground with him, the common ground
being modern mans insistence on his autonomy. From this they
hope to develop a Christian philosophy. But, according to
Scripture, the common ground between men is never to be
derived from mans attempt to be his own god, but from the
fact of creation. Not the wisdom of the natural man but the
wisdom of God is our starting point, and an inescapable one for
the unbeliever, as well as the believer since that which may be
known of God is manifest in them (or, to them), for God hath
shewed (or revealed) it unto them (Romans 1:19). This is Van
Tils common ground rather than any ostensibly valid
autonomous reasoning. Masselink, Cecil de Boer, Jesse de Boer,
Orlebeke and Van Halsema all want to grant to natural man
the validity of
his thinking in order to convert him; they begin with a
man-centered, fact-centered, or idea-centered approach and
hope thereby to establish Christian faith. But the sovereignty of
God is never ascertained by granting validity to mans claim to
sovereignty. The impotence of Jobs friends in dealing with
the problem of evil was most apparent as they confronted a
suffering man. The impotence of the traditional apologetics,
beginning with the natural mans philosophy and reason, has
been apparent in the history of Christian thought. It convinces
only already-convinced Christians, and cannot speak to the
natural man. Inevitably it leads even the Christians into
wayward theology.
The critics of Van Til say that we must begin with facts, or
with the universe, with reason, with mans freedom, or with the
ultimacy of chance. What we begin with is ultimately all that
we believe in. Our given, our starting point, is ultimately all
that our universe allows for. When we begin with man, we end
up by eliminating God in so far as He is offensive to mans
freedom and autonomy. When we begin with chance as ultimate
in any respect, we thereby establish chance as supreme over
God. When we begin with brute factuality, ultimately all that
our universe contains is brute factuality. If the universe is our
starting point, then the universe is also our point of conclusion,
and when mans reason or freedom is our given, it is also our
god. Wherever we find in any Christian institution an
emphasis on a rational theology, any principle of criticism,
whether it be in literature or elsewhere, which establishes the
dichotomy of form and matter, we have not Christian
philosophy nor the Christian philosophy of education, but an
Aristotelian or a Thomistic philosophy.
Van Til, as a consistent Calvinist, begins with God, the Triune
God, in every avenue of human thought and insists that only the
ontological Trinity, God in Himself, can be the Christian
starting point for philosophy. For Van Til there are no brute
facts, that is, nothing exists in and of itself and everything can
be truly understood only in terms of the Triune God and His
creative
will and purpose: therefore it is impossible to make brute facts,
the universe, reason, mans freedom, or any other thing our
starting point, since none of these things exist in and of
themselves, and all of them are understandable only in terms of
the Triune God. Since all things are understandable only in
terms of the Triune God, only the Triune God, the ontological
Trinity, can be the starting point for Christian philosophy.
Job and his friends affirmed their faith in the sovereignty of
God, affirmed it to a degree far more consistent than that of most
modern Reformed Christians, and yet all of them proved to be
defective in their faith and under the judgment of God because
in their thinking, in their philosophy, they approached the
problems of life, and, specifically, the problem of evil, from the
man-centered point of view. They began with man rather than
with God, and thus they could not account for the problem of
evil, of suffering, the problem of sin, nor could they give any
account of providence that was anything but offensive, because
their starting point was man-centered. As a result, they were
judged by God and required Jobs intercessory prayer.
The issue is the same today. What is our standard; by what
standards shall we approach the problems of philosophy and the
problems of everyday life? If we begin with anything other than
the ontological Trinity, with the sovereignty of God as
intellectually applied and systematically delineated in every
aspect and avenue of human thought, we end with the
destruction of Christian theology and the deterioration of
Christian life. God declared to the friends of Job and to Job
himself, Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without
knowledge? He went on to say in effect, I made all things and
before all things I AM, can anything be understood apart from
me? By what standard, by what standard have you dared to
approach the problem of life? Any standard other than the
Trinity, the Triune God in Himself, is an offense against God,
and the destruction of Christian faith and life. The only standard
that can be offered to this sinful world, the only standard which
Calvinism can consistently adhere to, is the Triune God, the
ontological Trinity. Any man
who attacks this standard is attacking the sovereignty of God; no
double talk can hide this fact. Whether explicitly or implicitly,
consciously or unconsciously, all who attack this starting point
in philosophy attack essentially the sovereignty of God in order
to assert the sovereignty of man. The peculiar venom which Van
Til has aroused by his gentle, kindly and consistent philosophy
is explicable only in these terms: he has laid bare the essential
fact that the sovereignty of man prevails rather than the
sovereignty of God in much of Reformed thought. The word of
God where faithfully preached, and the word of God where
faithfully expounded and applied in preaching, in theology and
philosophy, arouses either joy or hostility. Historically, this
hostility has most often manifested itself as an ostensible defense
of the faith. Indeed the very opposition of Satan to Christ
appears in the form of antichrist, a mock Christ, an ostensible
Christ offered to men as the true means of salvation. Against all
attacks on the sovereignty of God, against all such resistance to
the Triune God, God in Himself, as the starting point for all
theology and philosophy and life, itself our standard must be
this, whether it means the severing of brother and brother, that
to God alone belongs dominion. This is our Calvinistic
battlecry.
We Christians have forgotten what the saints of old knew too
well, that antichrist works from within the church, and that he
has his sway in us whenever and wherever we surrender the
fulness of the faith at any point in life or doctrine. In the wise
words of the saints of a past century, Supposing that Antichrist
and all his adherents were subdued, what would it avail us, if
we have an antichrist in our own body? The whole counsel of
God must be asserted, and, because our God is a God of both
sovereignty and grace, His mercy and forgiveness must be
extended to erring brethren insofar as it is possible, without
offense to the discipline of the church, that God might be made
manifest through us in both His glory and His grace. To rejoice
in anothers waywardness or sin, or to use it to our advantage,
is to give antichrist a victory in life while we ostensibly gain
one in
doctrine. May God grant to His church both firmness and grace
in dealing with wayward brethren: both are indispensible, and
we are summoned to worship God and reveal Him both in His
majesty and His mercy. We must earnestly contend for the
faith, and also, like Job, pray for our erring brethren.
5.
Biographical Note
Cornelius Van Til was born into a large family on May 3,

1895, in the Netherlands. His family migrated to the United
States in 1905, when he was ten years old, settling in Indiana.
The family farmed near the borderline of Indiana and Illinois,
close to Chicago, at Highland.
The family faith was Reformed, and church membership
Christian Reformed. Van Tils great love and abiding interest
in Kuyper and his works are a notable aspect of the man and
date back to his youth; he delights in reading him and warms
to the mention of his name. Van Til studied at Calvin College,
Grand Rapids, Michigan, to prepare himself for the ministry,
enrolling in 1921 at the Calvin Seminary. Subsequently, at
Princeton Seminary and University, he studied under such men
as C. Hodge, W. B. Greene, G. Vos, R. D. Wilson, W. P.
Armstrong, J. Gresham Machen and A. A. Bowman. A. A.
Bowman, then chairman of Princeton Universitys department
of philosophy, offered Van Til a graduate fellowship towards
his Ph.D. at the University, which he secured in 1927. In 1925
while still a student he married a long-time home-town friend,
Miss Rena Klooster. He remained at Princeton as a student for
five years (1922-27).
Subsequently he was ordained and called by the Spring Lake
Church of Classis Muskegon in Michigan, a small town on Lake
Michigan, some thirty miles from Grand Rapids. The following
year he was called to teach at Princeton Seminary, but resigned
at the end of the year in dissent at the Seminary reorganization.
He returned to Spring Lake, at first refusing to serve either
Princeton or the newly organized Westminster Seminary. The
206
call from Westminster was only accepted after Drs. Machen and
Allis traveled to Michigan to seek his and Rev. R. B. Kuipers
services. He was thus one of four Princeton professors who served
on the Westminster faculty, the others being Robert Dick
Wilson, J. Gresham Machen and Oswald T. Allis. Unlike the
others, Van Til was not a member of the Presbyterian Church
U.S.A.; however, after going to Westminster he became a
member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
At Westminster, he has exerted a steadily growing influence
on many graduate students, both American and foreign, and has
been in steady demand as a special lecturer at schools and
universities, as well as at conferences, across the country.
He has moreover, been an increasingly controversial figure.
By breaking with the old Princeton apologetics, and by calling
attention to the inconsistencies, in terms of their healthy
presuppositions, in the Amsterdam apologetics, he has aroused
the ire of the traditionalists in Reformed and Presbyterian
circles, while his analysis of neo-orthodoxy has made him
anathema in those circles. Despite this controversial nature of
his writings, he stands forth increasingly as one of the
outstanding and central figures in American Calvinist thinking
and a true son of John Calvin. Because he brings into so clear
focus many of the important aspects and implications of
Christian thinking, his importance and stature can scarcely be
assessed at this early date. Suffice it to say that in Van Til and
the men of Amsterdam we have one of the most significant
developments in the history of Christian philosophy and theology,
developments the importance of which cannot be ignored.
Van Til is not only a philosopher and theologian. A born
teacher, he is an outstanding and persuasive lecturer and
preacher, possessing, in his lecturing, the gift of simplicity. A
warm-hearted and humble man, he draws love and loyalty to
himself and gives it with equal readiness.
6.
A Van Til Bibliography
The following constitutes a list of the writings of Van Til,

exclusive of his many articles in various periodicals. In each
instance, the original date of publication, rather than of
subsequent editions, is noted.
Books
The New Modernism (1946, out of print)
Common Grace (1947, out of print)
Christianity and Idealism (1955, out of print)
The Defense of the Faith (1955)
Christianity and Modern Theology (1955, out of print)
The Theology of James Daane (1959, out of print)
Christianity and Barthianism (1962)
The Case for Calvinism (1946, out of print)
The Confession of 1967 (1968, out of print)
Christ and the Jews (1968, out of print)
A Christian Theory of Knowledge (1969)
The Great Debate Today (1970, out of print)
The Reformed Pastor and Modern Thought (1971)
Essays on Christian Education (1971, out of print)
The God of Hope (1978, out of print)
Syllabi
The Metaphysics of Apologetics (1931, out of print)
The Psychology of Religion (1935)
Christian Theistic Ethics (1947)
208
Christian Theistic Evidences (1947)
An Introduction to Systematic Theology (1949)
Christian Apologetics (1953)
Triumph of Grace (Heidelberg Catechism) (1959, out of print)
The Doctrine of Scripture (1969)
A Survey of Christian Epistemology (1970)
Pamphlets
Why I Believe in God (1948, out of print)
The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel (1959 in England, 1953 in
U.S.)
Has Karl Barth Become Orthodox? (1954, out of print)
The Dilemma of Education (1954, out of print)
Paul at Athens (1954, out of print)
Letter on Common Grace (1955, out of print)
Particularism and Common Grace (1955, out of print)
Witness Bearing and Common Grace (1956, out of print)
Banks Christology (1962)
Karl Barth and Evangelicalism (1964, out of print)
The Later Heidegger and Theology (1964, out of print)
Is God Dead? (1968, out of print)
Chardin: Christ or Evolution (1969, out of print)
See also
C. Van Til, introduction, pp. 3-68, to B. B. Warfield: The
Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, ed. by S. G. Craig. (1948)
C. Van Til, Nature and Scripture, pp. 225-293, in The Infallible
Word, A Symposium, by the Members of the Faculty of
Westminster Theological Seminary. (1946)
Jerusalem and Athens, ed. by E. R. Geehan. Critical discussions
on the philosophy and apologetics of Cornelius Van Til.
(1970)
Index
Abe l, 77 Calvin, Calvinism, 5f, 9, 13f, 15f, 36,

Ada m, 25 , 59 , 105 , 118 , 124 , 13 0 40ff, 53, 100, 102, 108ff, 124, 126,
Alexander, J. A., 199 176, 180ff, 187, 189, 199ff
Ames, 67 Calvin Forum, 20, 200
Amsterdam philosophy, 180-183 Carnap, R., 16
Analogical reasoning, 59, 73, 86f Carnell, E., 22, 81, 139, 140n
Antinomies of thought, 34f Chafer, L. S., 123, 133n
Apologetics, negative, 100-106 Chalcedon, 37, 105, 1 1 6 , 1 5 1 , 169f
Aposteriori, 28, 186 Chalmers, 123
Apostles Creed, 1 1 5 Christ-Event, 117f
Apriori, 28, 185f Christian Reformed Church, 108f, 119
Aquinas, Thomism, 3, 22, 85, 175, Circular reasoning, 29, 103f, 146
184, 186 Clar k, G . H., 22, 127f, 134 n
Aristotle, Aristotelianism, 2, 15, 33, Coherence in experience, 12
49, 94 Co mmo n gr ace , 62 , 108 , 120 , 128 ,
Arminianism, 14, 39f, 100, 162, 182f, 130f, 133
186 Common ground, 103
Associationism, 73f Correspondence, doctrine of, 130, 155
Augustine, 32f, 34, 51, 53, 143, 179 Covenant theology, 42f, 89f, 91
Authority of Bible, 135-148 Creationism, 9, l0f, 23, 40, 87, 93f,
Autonomous man, 8, 10, 13ff, 17, 20f, 129 , 13 0, 1 33 , 142 , 157
23f, 39f, 63, 73, 98, 103, 105f, 1 1 8 ,
135-138, 146, 183, 187 Daane, James, 6, 101, 1 1 2 , 1 1 7 , 120n,
121n, 1 7 1 , 200f
Baillie, John, 67, 80n David, 143
Barth, 5, 20, 26, 100, 1 1 6 , 1 1 7 , 126, De Boer, Cecil, 1 0 1 , 201
148, 149n, 151ff, 156, 162, 163n, De Boer, Jesse, 6, 101
164n, 166ff, 173n De J o ng , A. C, 1 2 0 n
Bavinck, 1 8 1 Descartes, Cartesianism, 2, 4, 8f, 10,
Being , Gr eek co nce pt of, 2, 3 1 , 33f, 44 f, 73
157 Deutsch, Babette, 5
Berkeley, 4, 10 Dialectical thought, 9, 21, 26, 154,
Berkouwer, G. C, 15If, 157, 162, 157
163n, 164n, 171, 173n Dictation theory, 141-144
Bible and facts, 53, 139 Dionysius, 127
Brunner, 5, 20, 26, 100, 1 1 6 , 126, 168, Diving board illus., 52
173n Dooyeweerd, H., 6, 13, 63, 1 8 1 , 183n
Brute factuality, 26, 28, 46, 6 1 , 1 1 4 ,
157, 185 Eddington, 27f
Burns, Robert, 5f Eden, 5
Butler, Bishop, 22, 184-187 Ehrenberg, H. P., 153ff
Button illus., 1 1 2 Emperor, naked, 19-21, 24f, 63
Empiricism, 45, 48
Cain, 77, 78 , 80 , 106 Environment and God, 86
210
Episcopalians, 150 Jeremiah, 143
Epistemology, 8-17, 21, 63, 85 Job, 188-205
Epistemological self-consciousness, John, 95
101-106, 128, 130, 133 Johnson, W. H., 12f, 15, 16
Ethics, 81-98 Judicial review by man over God, 20f,
Eutychianism, 37 22
Eve, 25, 30f, 32, 48, 66, 105
Evidence, 68 Kant, Kantianism, 4, 8, 10, 27, 46-50,
Evil, 32f, 34, 40, 55, 70, 83, 95, 122f, 51, 65, 66, 153, 154, 187
153 Kierkegaard, 117, 118, 119, 153
Ezekiel, 143 Kingdom of God, 89ff, 94f, 174, 176
Kinsey, 75f
Facts, Factuality, see also Brute Knowledge and God, 17, 27, 33, 40,
factuality, 51ff, 61, 127f, 132, 139f, 146, 159
145, 157, 162 Knowledge, Christian philosophy of,
Fall, see Original sin 8-17, 21-63, 72, 162
Feisser, 26 Knowledge, ethical presuppositions of,
Ferre, N, 156, 163n 131f
Feuerbach, 154 Knowledge, false ideal, 125f
Form and Matter, 2 Knowledge of God inescapable, 122
Knowledge of natural man, 11, 23
Knowledge, suppression of, 12
God, attributes, 125, 151ff Krauth, 37
God, finite, 27, 83f, 86, 157 Kuyper, Abraham, 100, 109, 181
God-consciousness, 102ff
Golden Rule, 82 Laban, 1-5
Goliath, 199 Ladder illus., 104
Good, Idea of, 31f Law of contradiction, 22, 60, 81, 139
Graf-Welhausen, 20 Leah, 1-5, 179
Greeks, Greek philosophy, 2f, 29ff, 40 Leibniz, 45f
Leuba, 67
Hackett, G. C, 182, 183n, 187 Loisy, 13, 16
Hall, Robert, 123 Luther, Lutheranism, 36ff, 41, 124
Haroutunian, J., 153, 163n Mackay, John A., 172, 173n
Hatred of God, 92 Man before God, 75
Health, 92 Mayhew, E., 120n
Heraclitus, 31 Marriage, 97
Hindman, Jo, 98n Masselink, 112ff, 181, 201
History, 56, 114, 128f, 137f, 168, 169 Melanchton, 36
Hodge, 199 Miracles, 12f, 15ff
Hoeksema, H., 109-119 Moment, 119
Hume, 4, 10, 45f, 51, 185f Morality as religious activity, 87f
Huxley, A., 58f Morality as sin, 81f
Natural theology, 180f
Idealism, 54 Nature and grace, 4
Ideas, 31f, 170 Naturalism, 54
Image of God in man, 36, 77, 83f, Neutrality, neutral ground, 22f, 30f,
122-133, 143 67, 114, 127
Impersonalism, 36, 39, 43, 124, 142 New Deal, 175
Indians, 15, 103 New England theology, 108
Infallibility, 9, 14f, 21, 84f, 135-148 Nicaea, 115, 116
Inspiration, 135-148 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 25, 137, 140n, 169
Integration into the void, 73-76 Nietzsche, 27, 136
Irrationalism, 73ff
Objectivity, 13f
Jacob, 1-5, 179 One and Many, 12, 34, 42, 7If, 119f,
172
James, William, 48, 67
Orlebeke, 6, 101, 201 Science, non-Christian view, 115f,
Original sin ethical, not 133
metaphysical, Self-realization, 90, 92
25f, 34, 85, 91, 111, 125, 145, 155f Seventh-day Adventists, 5
Original sin, fall, 5, 20, 25, 55, 66, Sheen, F. J., 35, 64n
111, 129, 133 Sin, see Original sin
Smith, H. Shelton, l20n
Pantheism, 151 Socianism, 108
Socrates, 67
Particulars, 69, 71f Soul and body dualism, 73f, 123f
Paul, 2, 118, 143 Soul-saving, 97
Perfection of universe, 96 Spinoza, 45, 51
Personality, absolute, 72f Strauss, 13, 16
Plato, Platonism, 2, 31, 37, 49 Subject-Subject relationship, 57f, 60
Polytheism, 151 Subordinationism, 42, 44, 165-172
Popma, K. J., 181 Synergism, 36f
Pragmatism, 54, 59, 136
Pratt, J. B., 67, 80n Taylor, A. E., 105
Predestination, eternal decree, 8, 9, Temptation, 5
117, 118, 130, 141f, 148 Ten Commandments, 136
Presbyterian Church, 150, 199 Theology Today, 12
Presuppositional reasoning, 103, 112 Theonomy, 98
Princeton apologetics, 100, 113, 180, Three Points on common grace,
184, 199 109ff
Pringle, Pattison, 54 Thurneysen, 154
Proofs of God, 102, 112 Tillich, 163n
Prosperity, 92 Time and eternity, 55f
Protestant Reformed Church, 110f Torch and Trumpet, 121n
Psychology of Religion, 65-80 Trinity, 3, 5, 6f, 9, 28, 34, 38, 42, 44,
50, 62, 71, 117f, 165, 169, 170ff,
Rachel, 1-5, 179 200f, 203
Ramm, B., 139
Rationalism, 2, 37, 39, 45, 48 Ultimacy, 4, 23, 30, 33, 48, 54, 61,
Reason, 14 68, 70, 114, 126
Relativism, 13, 71, 136 Unitarianism, 108, 150
Regeneration, 78f Universals, 34f, 45, 69, 70, 136
Religion, definitions of, 66ff Univocal reasoning, 45f
Religious consciousness, 65-80
Renan, 13, 16 Van Halsema, 101, 201
Resurrection, 3, 15 Van Riessen, H., 181
Revelation, 45, 59, 76f, 84f, 129, 161 Van Til, bibliography, 208f
Richardson, Alan, 22, 63n Van Til, biographical data, 206f
Rilke, 5 Virgin birth, 15
Ridderbos, 181 Vollenhoven, 181, 182
Roman Catholicism, 3, 5, 83, 88,
130,162, 174, 186 War, 95
Rustlers, 24, 62 Warfield, 199
Watson, 39
Sacraments, 36, 38 Weil, Simone, 83, 98n
Samson, 50 Westminster Confession, 14f, 156,
Satan, 30f, 48, 66, 96, 104, 105, 204 199
Saul, 199 White, M, 18n
Schilder, K., 120n Whitehead, 10, 18n
Schleiermacher, 65, 66 Wilbur, E. M., 120n
Scholastics, Scholasticism, 2, 4, 33-36, Wittgenstein, 16
100, 123f, 176 Wright brothers, 45
Schweitzer, 13, 16
Zetterholm, Earl, 121n

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An analysis of the

PHILOSOPHY OF CORNELIUS VAN TIL

ROUSAS JOHN RUSHDOONY

ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

Printed in the United States of America

Reprinted 1995 ROSS HOUSE BOOKS

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-074843

Basic to this study is the belief that the presuppositions of

Rousas J. Rushdoony, a native of New York City, now resides in

Behold it was Leah

A certain bridegroom went joyfully to bed one night,

The Christian Philosophy of Knowledge

Epistemology, or the philosophy of knowledge, has its

According to an old tale, certain clever philosophers

1. Alan Richardson: Christian Apologetics, p. 150 (Harper, New York).

Since 1890, but with admitted roots in Kant and

I. Cornelius Van Til: Psychology of Religion, p. 3.

Mans most refined and most popular means of sinning is by

Moral activity not only presupposes the sovereign and

Mans growth in self-realization is, we have seen, his growth

A particular point is that of the Christians attitude toward the

Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian philosophy of

1. C. Van Til: Apologetics, p. 1.

A central fallacy in contemporary Calvinist thinking comes to

Again, Hoeksema clearly stated, I always say, beloved: Give

Here again, as with Hoeksema, the basic fallacy is apparent and

1. Experience Mayhew, cited in H. Shelton Smith: Changing Conceptions of

The doctrine of the image of God in man has more than an

Man is and remains Gods self-conscious creature. It was in the

For an illustration, suppose that the discoverer of an uninhabited

If God is so elusive a fact, then indeed He is a seriously limited

It is thus in the mixed situation that results because of the factors

The natural mans conception of fact is that factuality is

1. C. Van Til: A Christian Theory of Knowledge, p. 177.

The doctrine of the inspiration and authority of Scripture

1. Reinhold Niebuhr: Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 2, p. 289 (Scribners,

Dictation and Inspiration

The dictation theory of inspiration brings to focus some of

1. C. Van Til: Metaphysics of Apologetics, p. 64.

The Authority of Scripture

Man does not establish authority; he acknowledges it. This

1. C. Van Til: The Psychology of Religion, p. 124.

The Self-Contained God

A woman in California invited her new neighbor to attend

For our present purposes, we will not examine Van Tils

The Christian idea of human knowledge as analogical of Gods

Thus we see that the reality of or thodoxy, despite

1. G. C. Berkouwer: The Triumph of Grace in the Theology of Karl Barth,

Christology and the Void

One of the misunderstandings which plagues a high doctrine

For as God Himself descended with us into pure contingency, we

It is to get beyond the reach of all historical and speculative

Barths doctrine of the freedom of God as it finds expression in what

In terms of this, he can speak of Gods will to unity in

How Wide a Gospel?

A pertinent question at this point is, how wide a gospel do

1. C. Van Til: Introduction to Systematic Theology, 1952 ed., p. 179.

The Sons of Leah

Lest there be any misunderstanding, it is perhaps best to

Van Til and Amsterdam

1. C. Van Til: The Defense of the Faith, p. 358.