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Reformed Classicalist

A Critical Assessment of Van Til's Christian Theory of Knowledge: Part 2

RTS Papers / History of Christianity II / Spring 2017


Apostasy as an Intellectual Phenomena.


Van Til understood that doctrine not only does divide, but that it ought to divide. In order to appreciate this we must notice that not all divisions are equal. Someone who thinks on the level of Van Til thinks of doctrinal divisions primarily as epistemic affairs. Systematic theologians do not tend to think of doctrinal divisions primarily as the parting of ways between brothers or church traditions. The latter is a consequence of the former, and the systematic theologian is not unaware of that, but he is not particularly giddy about that happening.


What happens when the “quality control” guy is not also aware of the sensitivities of those not called to his work? When the cultural context we live in is increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-polemical, the theologian’s “quality control” speech more easily gets misquoted, misconstrued, and otherwise hijacked by winsome wolves whose task is to neutralize any talk of doctrinal precision, any suggestion that this or that idea could go in a bad direction.


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


The central test case in Van Til’s career was his changing interaction with G. C. Berkhouwer. He initially praised Berkhouwer for his critique of Barth, and then expressed disappointment when the continental theologian had changed his tune in the 1950s; as Muether summarizes, “Van Til described Berkhouwer as seeking incoherently to combine Barth and Bavinck, and ‘Barth is gaining on Bavinck.” What did that statement mean but that there is a tendency, a building critical mass, in one’s doctrinal development? On this journey old commitments are weighed in the balance and found wanting.


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

Van Til turned his guns from the Neo-Orthodox to the Neo-Evangelical, seeing that the latter had been infiltrated by the former, beginning as they did in Arminianism and doctrinal indifferentism. For this he was attacked on all sides.

But Van Til was essentially right, even if he made his case by blaming some of the wrong things and with all the charm of an inquisitor. One can no longer compare the Protestant and Catholic starting points, he argued, because the Lutheran and Arminian traditions have coalesced into the new Evangelicalim. So “we may say then that the Romanist system can be called Christian, but with a large admixture of naturalism. Evangelicalism is Protestant but with some, though a much smaller, admixture of naturalism.”


Reformed Particularism—the Preservative.


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


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

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

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


Now what about the second part of that boomerang effect? I said that Van Til’s quality control (heresiology) got confused with the field work (apologetics), but we will recall that I also said that this, in turn, led to a confusion of the field work (apologetics) with the product itself (epistemology). We can see this in the nebulous way that the phrase “starting point” is used in related debates. How we know what we know as a “starting point” can mean different things, depending on what one is doing.


Let me use a simple piece of imagery. Where does one “start” on a house? My answer is that it all depends whether we are talking about the builders who are contracted or the guests that I have invited over for the holiday. One starts with the foundation and the other starts with the front door. It is exactly the same when it comes to the difference between practical apologetics and the place of epistemology in system building. The effect of a few generations of presuppositionalist literature has been to blur this distinction.


It is true that our defense of the faith and our method of reason are mutually interdependent. They can certainly come to determine each other. Here is how Van Til would put it. The Arminian and the Romanist will defend the faith differently than the Reformed because they will reason by a different principle. That is to say that Arminian and Catholic apologetics will allow axioms of reason (rationalism) and sense data / experimental results (empiricism) to function as starting points or as ultimate criteria in this or that conversation with the unbelieving world.

So the secular canons of reason determine the defense. We always play by their rules. Likewise the rot spreads in reverse: the Arminian and the Romanist infers his system of doctrine from the moving target of foundations that the present culture finds intellectually satisfying.

One clear example is how the apologist and systematic theologian alike deal with the problem of evil. Once we have solved the problem of evil, for example, by the free will defense, we have now made room for free will to precede saving grace. Van Til’s own answer to the problem of evil was to posit God as his own theodicy, echoing Augustine, Calvin, etc. But the usual concession made to free will boomerangs back from the apologist into our understanding of salvation. Consequently the problem of evil is an arena that seems to wonderfully make Van Til’s point.


On the other hand, what about the self-attestation of Scripture? Both classicalists and presuppositionalists can agree that the Word of God authenticates itself. The question is not whether the internal testimony of the Spirit is subjectively ultimate to validate the truth of God. The question is whether or not things objectively external to the scriptural propositions can function as epistemological preconditions in any sense. The presuppositionalist will not deny that this is psychologically the case. We learn the ABCs before we derive genuine belief from scriptural propositions. At what point to “larger chunks” of general revelation become translated, in the Van Tillian mindset, into “autonomous reasoning”?

Van Til is surely correct in insisting that we must not commend Scripture to be read as merely a historically reliable document. It must be read as God’s own word. But as Lewis once pointed out, the word “merely” is a tricky thing.

Do our children read the Bible as God’s own word? What all does that require? A new heart to be sure. And yet there we are as parents, reading it to them—merely on the grounds that we are their parents and they enjoy hearing stories from us. Why is this not as inherently suspect as the invitation for the skeptic to consider the archeological evidence for the dating of prophetic books or the corroboration of certain first century writers like Tacitus or Josephus? There is an answer: the child has a heart to believe and the skeptic does not. Even granting this, such things should be weighed on a case by case basis.


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