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Reformed Classicalist

A Critical Assessment of Van Til's Christian Theory of Knowledge: Part 1

RTS Papers / History of Christianity II / Spring 2017


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

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


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


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


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


Then in 2001, I read Classical Apologetics. My mind was made up, so that even reading Van Til’s Christian Apologetics and Frame’s Apologetics to the Glory of God a few years later did not change my basic thoughts about presuppositionalism (though I found Frame’s book to be much more consistent with a serious engagement with unbelieving systems of thought). Naturally it will be objected that I am reading Van Til through a Frame lense rather than a Bahnsen lens, or that (like any critique Van Til) I have not really understood him, or I have read the wrong things. “What you really ought to read of Van Til is such and such.” But such wears thin. The more we read of Van Til the more he confirms his own thought, not simply as paradoxical and unclear. I am willing to claim that he has been all too clear to my reading. There is no point is in feigning humility that will not spare the usual complaints anyway.


At any rate, after the news of being accepted to RTS in January 2016, I had a few more months at my church of teaching classes and decided to do a course with our college students on Frame’s Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, during which time I would also read Van Til’s Introduction to Systematic Theology. I tried to allow my mind to change — a little. I had at least come to the place where there was now more appreciation for what Van Til and (by extension) Frame were up to. They have some very valuable theological pieces to protect and situate in their proper place. I also attempted to see that perhaps the authors of Classical Apologetics may have overreached in their critique of the notion that Van Til rejected any common ground with the unbeliever. After all Van Tillians were insisting repeatedly that their forbearer had affirmed common ground. And indeed there were many statements I begin to see in Van Til where he did affirm it—with one hand that is. We will come back to that.


On the other hand, my original discomfort persists at a pattern of emphasis that eschews and deconstructs any talk of natural theology and even objective truth—at least as that latter term was traditionally used.

The purpose of this brief sketch of my own journey is to make as plain as I can that the issues I have with Van Til are less about apologetic method and almost entirely about epistemological foundations for the entire Christian worldview.

It is also my natural inclination to show how Van Til must be understood by providing context from his historical predecessors—most immediately in the form of Kuyper, Bavinck, Vos, Warfield, and Machen—however, because of the nature of this essay, I will include that material in an appendix at the end. First we must dive into Van Til’s Christian Theory of Knowledge. This book was chosen, quite frankly, in order to give its author one more chance to explain himself.


Heresiology and Epistemology: A Confusion of Fields


My opening analogy of the quality control supervisor (heresiologist) is useful first in looking at the structure of the book. A book entitled “A Christian Theory of Knowledge” instantly strikes one as a synonym for “A Christian Epistemology.” Yet this is precisely not what we get from its author; at least not in a systematic form. There is no unpacking of the mechanisms of knowing, nor of the nature of the objects of knowledge. No doubt the work is occupied with epistemology in surveying the field of all of the wrong theories of knowledge out there. And Van Til pits scriptural authority against autonomous reason exactly where one would expect. There is his epistemology at the outset. What could be clearer and more pious? Let me answer by doing what one should always do at the beginning of any disagreement. We should first define our terms.


What is epistemology? Very often it will be defined as either our “theory of knowledge” or else the answer to the question “How do you know?” But this is problematic in our present case. Even if we accept these two angles into our definition, it may escape our notice how the two are set off on contradictory aims. A theory of knowledge, if successful, will presumably be about real knowledge. If true knowledge, then it must be a knowledge of something real above and beyond our own finite capacities of reason. In short, this knowledge is objective. It is of a real truth that must be true independent of my mind or yours.


And we will remember that the second angle on defining epistemology was as an answer to the question “How do you know?” Now this question may be entirely subjective. It may refer to the natural history of one’s own knowledge—i. e. “Where did you learn that?” or “How did you arrive at that conclusion?” It may be cognitive science. It may be dismissive Marxist deconstruction. It may be any number of probes into how a particular finite mind, or group of finite minds, happen to perform in their acts of reasoning. Now there is nothing wrong with those questions. But if that was all we mean by “epistemology” then the subtitles on the package—“truth criteria” or “standards for truth”—may understandably leave us with buyer’s remorse.

No doubt “How we know” is a legitimate portion of epistemology, but “How do we know that we know” is what I like to call first order epistemology. The subjective question about “one’s own knowledge,” or any finite perspective, while not unimportant, I prefer to call second order epistemology.

How this second-order subjective definition came to be the central focus of epistemology is owing to the triumph of Kant. Following the Enlightenment, epistemology “moved indoors,” and any talk of the objective essence of things was restricted to the realm of “pure reason” which Kant taught us all to leave behind. The knowledge studied by epistemology was now only allowed to be that knowledge as it appears to the finite perspective.


Classicalism rejects this wholesale. Modern — or, perhaps it could be said, Postmodern — perspectivalism follows from the Kantian rejection of “the noumenal.” Van Til and his tradition think they are rejecting Kant’s Critique. I do not think this is so. In speaking of Van Til’s system, Frame very helpfully refers to a domain of epistemology in a more objective way: namely, the “metaphysics of knowledge.” That is certainly a good start. But I think we need to follow through, even if it means discovering that Van Til was simply wrong about these things: even if it means finding out that Van Til and his tradition has been operating on assumptions that were Kant’s conclusions.


Strangely enough I think the best way to show how Van Til commits the error that he does is by setting it against the backdrop of something I think he should be admired for. Unsurprisingly Van Til is held at a distance for his heresiology, namely, in his great sin of finding a heretic under every non-Van-Tillian-phrase. Perhaps he was harsher and more exacting at times. So the admirable quality that I am referring to is not so much that isolationist edge, but rather his understanding of Reformed orthodoxy (here I mean the objective system and not the school of the seventeenth century Reformed theologians) and the task of the theologian in its maintenance.


The first thing we need to understand about Van Til’s defensive stance is how he understood the nature of the thing he was defending. The Christian faith is a system of truth. It is integrated. It is a perfect unity in God’s mind. It ought to be so in our minds, at least in a way proper to our creaturely knowledge. The fact that we do not know as God knows does not alter the reality that the integrative and disintegrative nature of systematic truth will still operate in our finite, sinful minds. Pull a stitch out and the fabric begins to unwind. For example, compromise on our doctrine of God or of man, and what follows (logically and psychologically) is a different doctrine of the God-man. One error begets another, and the aberration in one’s doctrinal trajectory becomes exponential. Van Til understood this, just as Machen did. On the other hand, we do not see the system as a whole. It is not for us a purely deductive system, but rather we continue to come to the Scriptures to submit to its truth.


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


Even Frame’s complimentary analysis of “no central truth” in Van Til must be balanced. It is not enough to see that each doctrine is perfectly connected with each other doctrine, for not all doctrines are metaphysically equal. But does this match the analysis that Van Til followed the Idealists of the nineteenth century in having a central dogma? Van Til was truly Reformed in his insistence that the doctrine of God functioned as a center of gravity. Specifically our doctrine of God must hold that he is the Absolute Person. This means that the First Cause must be infinite, self-sufficient, Trinity. So to change metaphors from the stitch and the fabric to something with more substance: Pluck the sun from the center of the solar system and we lose the whole center of gravity. All is immediately lost. Compromise the doctrine of God. What follows? The doctrines of how God saves and what he saves us unto cannot help but be radically altered as a consequence.


Van Til’s Reformed heresiology cannot be dismissed as a knee-jerk fundamentalism that sees a slippery slope at every turn. It was a faithful analysis of the nature of the singular universe of doctrine, as far as it goes. Because God is self-contained, so the Word of God is self-contained. And because the Word of God is self-contained, in that Word, God is self-identified and plays the role of the Ultimate Interpreter of all facts. Van Til would say that God is the ultimate reference point of predication, whereas in every other system, man is the ultimate reference point of predication. There can be no disagreement with Van Til here among the Reformed.


This notion of a perfectly coherent system was both Van Til’s great strength and, I believe, a blind spot in the tradition which followed him. He himself rightly saw that “Every fact in the universe is what it is just because of the place that it has in this system.” However a stifling reductionism ensues when every particular criterion cited to judge a truth claim is made immediately to answer to the whole or else be dismissed as “autonomous” or a “brute fact” or a “truth free of interpretation.”


Take C. S. Lewis famed Moral Lawgiver argument. What does he begin with but a common sense of right and wrong? Ah, but the unbeliever has a different definition of right and wrong! This is the standard operation. Because no fact can stand on its own (i. e. a “brute fact”), no common field of analogy is permitted just insofar as it lacks a fully Christian interpretation. But how full of an interpretation must we require? The instinct to see an Arminian or Romanist under every extra-biblical term has made it difficult for the presuppositional method to shine precisely as an apologetic (which I believe it can in certain spots), and has instead barred access for the Reformed mind toward the resources of general revelation or the wisdom in other traditions.


The authors of Classical Apologetics peg this Van Tillian impulse as a denial that one can know a particular truth without knowing the universality of truth: the relationship of that truth to all others. That really would lead to agnosticism. If we read Van Til thoroughly we may see a bit more sophistication, namely, that the particular facts are true “because their relation to the system of truth set forth in Scripture” — not that Scripture has to explicitly make a pronouncement on each and every particular. In other words, the extra-biblical particular truth must be coherent with biblical truth universal. Fair enough, but that is about as far as we can be fair. To "take our stand in Scripture" (a phrase used also by Bavinck before him) comes to mean to reject any premise that comes from natural revelation.


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


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