RTS Papers / History of Christianity II / Spring 2017
Van Til’s Narrative of the History of Western Thought
A Christian Theory of Knowledge begins by defining the basic terms of the Christian position and the non-Christian, taking their interpretive cues from either Scripture or autonomous reason. At this point Van Til begins a survey of how Christians throughout church history have bridged the gap between God’s word and the unbelieving world. The first few centuries were a continuous exercise in making the gospel embedded in what the Greek already knew. So there is more amalgamation than there is analogy. Justin Martyr was held out as the prototype in this compromise. More interesting is how Van Til saw the Logos Christology as an attempt to relate the eternal Christ to all of the aspects of creation that make for good apologetics. Thus it leads immediately to subordinationism. This is interesting because of Frame’s comment that Van Til saw all deviations as a form of subordinationism. From Tertullian he takes the commitment to preserve the rule of faith, which he treated as a synonym for “the teaching of Scripture.”
Van Til saw in Augustine a thinker that the church could get behind—but only the later Augustine, and even then only as a rough first sketch. Not only did the bishop of Hippo give us a precursor to the Reformed doctrines of grace, but also “a new philosophy of history” in which a “self-attested Christ” stands opposed, point for point, against the philosophy of the earthly city. This is the Kuyperian antithesis read back into Augustine, not in a totally forced way, but certainly so as to distance the two-city narrative from the early writings that were dependent upon Platonic categories as well as from the Aristotelian ones to come among the Scholastics.
The most infamous misreading of historical philosophy, I contend, that Van Til had done is his hatcheting to Thomas Aquinas. It was filtered down to the popular level through Francis Schaeffer and others. And though I received much from Schaeffer’s treatment of the flow of Western thought, his “nature eats up grace” formula for Aquinas always seemed a bit forced. “The first thing to note,” Van Til began, “about the approach of Thomas is that he begins his identification of God … by means of the natural reason.” This may seem reasonable enough at first glance. In all of Thomas’ five ways to show the existence of God he begins with something in this world. Whether it was from motion, cause, possibility and necessity, the gradation of things in their imperfection, and things being driven toward an end, in all of these cases it seems that Aquinas is moving from material particulars to universals.
It is the upshot that most concerns Van Til, and yet his claim about it is remarkable: “It is in this way that Thomas combines one principle which, if carried through, would lead to the idea that man can know nothing of God and another principle which, if carried through, would lead to the idea that man can know everything of God.” Further he says that this is “correlative to the rationalism involved in the idea that man can directly participate in a process of definition by which all reality can be exhaustively known.” This assessment is bound to leave a sour taste with the reader. Is this anything more than rhetoric? He certainly means it to be. It rests on the notion that Thomas’ doctrine of analogy is really more of a balancing act between univocal and equivocal knowledge. It is not genuine analogy between Creator and creation, between God’s knowledge and ours.
“So then Thomas thinks he has the right to argue from effect to cause without first inquiring into the differences in meaning between the idea of cause when used by Christians and the idea of cause when used by those who do not take the Christian position.”
Here is a crystal clear example of my thesis. Van Til makes “cause” per se equivalent to “all of the relations of cause to all other relevant things.” In other words, the unbeliever is wrong about the nature of causality to such an extent that the point of contact between the believer and unbeliever in their use of the term is severed, unintelligible, and thus fruitless.
So here Van Til confuses one set of starting points with another. That is, he confuses “where one starts” (as a system-builder / objective epistemology) with “where one starts” (in an apologetic encounter with someone who needs the apologist to take that one more definitional step back). Now Van Til would have a point against Aquinas when it comes to someone who really does have a radically different definition of cause. But the extent to which unbelief goes in distorting the concept of causality varies from one unbeliever to another (as well as believers, I might add).
As a further consequence it is said that God is no longer the Absolute-Person of Scripture but is reduced to a mere “it,” the conclusion to an Aristotelian syllogism, the sort of Supreme Being that the natural man may easily reconcile to himself. This criticism is certainly not unique to Van Til; and yet a simple perusal of a lineup of those who usually do make this criticism would place presuppositionalists in unwelcome company with fideists and fundamentalists. This is not guilt by association. There is a common thread at least at this point, where there is a reluctance to handle general revelation. Natural theology is consigned to being “a synthesis of Aristotle plus Christ.”
Within Lutheranism, Melanchthon at first and Francke later would affirm divine sovereignty in a first step and then water in down in a second. Van Til remarks that “In both cases it was really a development rather than a reversal. And it could not be a development if there were not already some germ of the second position found in the first position.” This is a brief sampling of how Van Til understands the interconnectedness of doctrine: how one error is connected to others, how one error is other errors in the making. And on that score, Van Til is in line with the historical viewpoint.
In What Ways Does Van Til Depart From Classical Christian Epistemology?
First let us examine his understanding of paradox. Because all of our knowledge is analogical, for this very reason it must also be paradoxical. What did Van Til mean by this? Let us take for example that God is one and that three are God. Does the Bible not teach both? Strangely the solution of Van Til is not to resort to the classical distinction between the ontological Trinity and the economic Trinity, for that distinction is yet a third thing beyond Scripture and thus stands as a “brute fact” outside of what God has revealed.
In fact how Van Til handled the doctrine of the Trinity is a microcosm for how he handled the aforementioned paradox between unity (pro-system) and diversity (anti-system). The resolution is his view of analogy. But this analogy: is it a brute fact? Is it data from beyond divine revelation?
He derives it, unlike St. Thomas, he believes, from the biblical doctrine of the image of God, and the Creator-creature distinction implied therein. God’s knowledge is archetypal. Man’s knowledge is ectypal. God’s knowledge is intuitive. Man’s knowledge is discursive.
More than that, analogical reasoning is not simply dependent on God. It must be “self-consciously dependent on God.” There is either analogical reasoning in this sense, or else autonomous reasoning. There is no middle ground. Autonomy in thinking is the attempt to interpret facts other than as reinterpretations of God’s interpretation. A charge of the “double theory” of truth has been made against Van Til along these lines. That is to say that a thing can be “true” in the realm of reason, yet “false” in the realm of religion. Van Til and his followers would adamantly deny this.
However the Van Tillians reconcile this, it must be admitted that many statements are found in Van Til’s writings that give the impression of surrender to the rational criteria of the world. In other words, that the “rational” is the “autonomous.” As to biblical criticism he asks whether the Christian should be “an obscurantist and hold to the doctrine of authority of the Scripture though he knows it can empirically be shown to be contrary to the facts of Scripture themselves?” Such statements are doubly unhelpful because they seem to conflate empirical testing with logical contradiction, and they also seem to concede that there are indeed contradictions in the Scripture. If all Van Til wanted to do is to have us all confess that we have not reconciled everything and that our commitment to Scripture should not wait for such reconciliation — if that is all he means to say, there are certainly less confusing ways to say it. He further said that “the idea of truth as found in Scripture does not, as noted, mean a logically penetrable system.”
Why use such terminology? Logic does not “penetrate” for new data to begin with. It measures the coherence of that which is already given. It has nothing to tell us about the top floor of the Deuteronomy 29:29 line between the secret things and the things revealed. Why not say it like that? As it stood Van Til’s words give the impression that logic is equivalent to man’s probing act of reasoning.
Incidentally we see the same tendency in Westminster’s Vern Poythress today, whose text on Logic speaks of a dichotomy between (1) a “Christian logic” and (2) a universally right logic. The consequence of such emphases, I am arguing, is to commend an antipathy to further study the nature of things (e. g. formal logic) — ironic since Poythress has written so many wonderful books applying the biblical worldview to the nature of subjects such as mathematics, sociology, linguistics, the natural sciences, etc.
Frame acknowledged that Van Til was not always clear on the place of logic. At one point he affirms that we can use logic for “good and necessary consequence” where Scripture in implicit.
Theology Makes Apologetics—with a Vengeance. One of the most important things I can say at this point is that I have absolutely no disagreement with Van Til concerning the subordination of apologetics to dogmatic theology, and that in turn to specially revealed theology. The influence of Calvin and Vos in particular demanded this theme. This is not only a priority of system but of the very nature of God as Creator. On the blackboard of his classrooms Van Til would draw his signature diagram: two circles, one larger above the other, plenty of distinguishing space between them, yet two lines connecting them. The larger circle on top represented God the Creator. The lower circle below represented the creation. The lines were those of communication to show that this was not deism.
And yet there was a kind of dualism. Van Til faulted all other thought, outside of true Christianity, as being essentially monistic. This explained why sinful man thinks he can subject God to his standards. That is what we do with all of the other objects of our knowledge. The fact that the we think we can do it to God betrays that we see him as part of the creation.
(#apologetics #VanTil #VanTillianism #presuppositionalism #classicalapologetics)
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