RTS Papers / History of Christianity II / Spring 2017
Why Van Til’s Heresiology and Epistemology Both Matter Today
One common theme in presuppositional literature that we have ignored thus far is the concern about probabilistic arguments as opposed to those featuring certainty. In what sense certain? The question over the epistemic strength of an argument has been mangled up in some of the same equivocal webs already addressed. Whether a conclusion of an argument follows by logical necessity or whether it is merely probable, even highly probable, is a legitimate field of epistemology. But here again, the ordinary meaning to these words in a logic textbook is conflated with the use of these words as psychological states. The result is one more very unhelpful equivocation. There is no space here to argue for the place of logical necessity in either apologetics or systematic theology. My concern here is only in how such ideas as “certainty” and “probability” play out in contemporary religious thought, especially in popular thought.
The bottom line is that “Van Tillianism” just does cultivate relativism unless read specifically (and almost exclusively) for the heresiology element: if one can so compartmentalize. No doubt many can. However, when Christians who are called into arenas of reasoning with unbelievers encounter Van Til, the response is either to retreat from such a rational arena in the world or else to retreat from any Reformed theology that is perceived to be associated with Van Til. The student will either be attracted or repelled, but my own experience with others in these conversations as well as my direct analysis of Van Til tells me that the attraction element will produce a relativistic basis for Reformed doctrine and the repelling element will send reflective types away from Reformed theology and toward more Arminian classicalists, or else to Rome, or else even further out. My own appeal to Van Til can be summarized in his sentiment that,
“the Lord hath appointed us ministers of his doctrine with this proviso, that we are to be as firm in defending as faithful in delivering it.”
There is a kind of sub-spirit of the age, a kind of false winsomeness, that I believe casts a shadow on the next generation of Reformed ministers and institutions. It operates under the assumption that polemical preaching, preventative teaching (in the proper forum of course), and logically consistent dogmatics are a thing of the past; appropriate perhaps for the early modern European scene, but not for our day. With Van Til I must respectfully disagree point to the antithesis. No doubt the tone of a Luther can be shed, but it seems to me that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But against Van Til I do not think the correct antithesis can be maintained by (more irony) surrendering the concepts of “nature” and “object” and “reason” to the realms of “autonomy” and “neutrality.” This all still strikes me as a more high brow Dutch brand of fundamentalism. It is a great deal of intellectual acumen in the service of just one more anti-intellectualism.
I am afraid that the Reformed world has embraced the wrong side of the Van Til equation and rejected the wrong side as well. In short, we have rejected the whole intellectual impulse behind Van Til’s heresiology in the name of winsomeness and we have exalted Van Til’s epistemology in the name of biblical faithfulness. This is an ironic tradeoff. I want to argue that Van Til’s epistemology actually jeopardizes winsomeness (yes, I know, there are many counterexamples: thanks be to God!) specifically because it trains us to be suspicious of learning anything outside of the most narrow conception of the Reformed perspective. Conversely I would argue that it is Van Til’s heresiology, broadly conceived, that preserves biblical faithfulness by maintaining the principial role of systematic theology over the whole house of orthodoxy.
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Appendix 1: How Should Van Til be Read in Light of His Context?
Like many other modern Christians, the young Van Til’s church experience was immersed in the questions of being in the changing world without getting caught up in it. However this tension was heightened among the Dutch, since the churches transplanted from Holland had more consciously resisted Americanization. He would learn from R. B. Kuiper and Louis Berkhof while at Calvin. Once at Princeton, he would have John Murray as a classmate and Geerhardus Vos and J. Gresham Machen as professors. He had just missed B. B. Warfield, who had died the year before his arrival.
The passing of the baton from Machen to Van Til at the new Westminster Theological Seminary had the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as its backdrop. These men believed that the legacy of conservative American Presbyterianism was being handed on to them. Today such a sentiment would be considered arrogant. No doubt it was considered so then too. However this sense of responsibility is one of the laudable things about Van Til in my judgment.
As with any seminal thinker we will be more ready to understand them by discovering what ideas influenced them. The first influence is the easiest to show. Van Til came to America among the younger generation affected by the Afscheiding, which was a secession movement with the Dutch Reformed Church. Its leader Abraham Kuyper held out Calvinism as the only genuine antithesis to the Enlightenment. This is a crucial point to remember when coming to grips with Van Til. The rationale goes all the way back to the first philosophers in Greece.
Only a view that unifies all of the diverse things we see in the world can possibly be true and provide sufficient motive for the good life. We have not improved upon the pagans by our “Christian” system if there is no sufficient Being at the center of it all and as the End of it all.
The Calvinistic doctrine of God made sense of everything from church dogma to art to politics to science. Although the word “worldview” comes, technically, out of the German Enlightenment, the appropriation of the concept by this Dutch Neo-Calvinism was envisioned as the only alternative to facing Modernism.
But all was not a seamless garment. So the first paradox of Van Til can also be located back in Kuyper. It is the central paradox. Let us state it like this: (A) the truth of Christ is over all things and (B) whatever is not in the Christian system is not true. The word “whatever” in the latter proposition must be queried. Now if this paradox comes to consistently mean that (A) all truth is God’s truth and that (B) all other claims to be true are, in reality, false, well then we can all agree. But we can only do so by resolving the paradox, not to merely revel in it.
The other thing one could mean by this paradox is that whatever is “true” in the God-interpreted system is true and whatever is “true” in the merely man-interpreted (autonomous reason) system is really false. The concept of true must not be allowed as a neutral class, or genus, that stands above the Christian and non-Christian circles of truth in which particular species of true things exist.
The issue of whether predicates such as “true” could have univocal meaning (one-to-one identity), as opposed to equivocal meaning (no identity), was at the heart of the Clark—Van Til debate. As later commentators, such as Frame, have pointed out, Van Til was not guilty of affirming equivocal meaning between ideas and things anymore than Clark was guilty of affirming completely univocal meaning. What Van Til did want to press was the Creator / creation distinction, which he believed was compromised to the degree that we confuse our knowledge of a truth with God’s knowledge of that same truth.
Muether refers to the paradox as one between “antithesis and common grace,” and regards it as a strength to Van Til’s thought, not a weakness. That the two go together is a biblical truth. We might ask whether the Van Tillian synthesis winds up communicating not so much a paradox of the two, but a contradiction. If the latter, then we would expect a resultant tension between the two: some preferring antithesis to common grace and others vice-versa. Van Til himself inclined himself toward one side,
as Muether remarks that he “tended toward more antithetical and confessional emphasis and was less interested in social or political transformation than in preserving sound doctrine.”
Later on it is suggested that he more fully rejected the Kuyperian doctrine. That is, he tended to shun categories that were “borrowed from” common grace, in spite of the fact that, out of the other side of his mouth, he was saying that the unbeliever is the one “borrowing” from the truth of God. This begs the question as to whose property common grace really is. Is it primarily enemy occupied territory or is it primarily a stewardship of God to his people? If it is the latter, then calling this “neutral territory” because of how the enemy treats it is to make a very ironic concession.
Van Til’s comparison of Aquinas to Kuyper is helpful at least in understanding what he took from the latter. “In form at least Kuyper would therefore agree with Aquinas when he says that the supernatural or spiritual does not destroy but perfects nature. But Kuyper’s ideas of the natural and the supernatural are quite different from those of Aquinas. For Aquinas the natural is inherently defective; it partakes of the nature of non-being. Hence sin is partly at least to be ascribed to finitude. For Kuyper the natural as it came from the hand of God is perfect.” Once again there is a blurring of epistemology and soteriology as he draws inferences from this. The upshot for Aquinas was that grace works to perfect nature, to complete its natural trajectory. For Kuyper the special principle of grace was independent of nature and could therefore judge nature, while not being judged by it. The extreme of this was Kuyper’s seeming condemnation of apologetics.
The second clear influence on Van Til comes from the other great Dutch theologian at the turn of the century, Herman Bavinck. In the Prolegomena section of his Reformed Dogmatics he sometimes seems of two minds when it comes to the classical notion of objective truth.
Bavinck was clearly trying to criticize the “ethical theologians” who followed Kant through the nineteenth century. He condemned the wider scope of modern theologians for ascribing “to reason the right to determine what is revelation.” Van Til read Bavinck to be so suspicious of Rome’s embrace of the modern worldview, that anything its philosophy touched must be inseparable from modernism.
What is less clear is the sense in which nineteenth century Continental philosophy — principally from the fountainheads of Kant’s subjectivism and Hegel’s idealism — trickled through the Dutch forerunners, as well as 1920s Princeton, to Van Til. Those who are unfamiliar with the history of Western philosophy may fail to appreciate just how much everyone after Kant is influenced by his divide between what he called the “noumenal,” to which belonged metaphysical essence, or, the way things really are, and below that line the “phenomenal,” to which belonged the physical world of external appearances.
Van Til does show conscious rejection of Kant’s ultimate denial of knowledge, as evidenced by his constant affirmation that the Christian system gives us both the “that” and the “what” of a thing’s reality — a two point breakdown that those familiar with Kantian thought will associate with those noumenal and phenomenal realms. But there are other elements of Kant’s Critique that we might want to keep in mind. I refer especially to the universality of truth, reasoned about with other minds, the denial of such, and therefore the necessity of presupposing foundational truths for the purpose of practical reason.
Now some critics have falsely imagined that Van Til was never “trained in philosophy.” But that is not quite the case. He was admitted to Princeton’s PhD program in that field. The question is not the whether of philosophy but the which. His mentor was one A. A. Bowman, an idealist and personalist. I am not suggesting that the student received an overhaul in the structure of his thought at this point. Perhaps it was only a matter of lingo; but it may be instructive that the dissertation was titled “God and the Absolute.” Of course Van Til would mean something radically different than Hegel by that word. Just so, a classical apologist may mean something radically different than Hume by “nature,” or very different than Descartes by “reason,” or utterly different than the Enlightenment as a whole by “objective.” If we extend this charity about words to Van Til, why should those in Van Til’s tradition not afford the same charity toward their classical brethren?
I said that Van Til was trained in philosophy — contrary to what many of his critics have suggested — though Muether acknowledges about his career as a whole: “Van Til was not a Christian philosopher; he rarely strayed beyond theology in his writings or in the classroom.”
Instead Van Til was happy to laud two contemporary Dutch thinkers as the real philosophers of his movement: Herman Dooyeweerd and Dirk Hendrik Theodoor Volenhoven. A careful look into their own projects shows that they conceived their projects as swimming against the current of a Neo-Kantian renewal, and yet the same acceptance of Kant’s main thesis is uncritically accepted by them.
Van Til flatly denied that he was an Idealist. Charges that he was essentially innovating on the basis of Hegel prompted him to write Christianity and Idealism. But go back to how Van Til resolved the tension between System and Anti-System (or Paradox). The two cannot finally contradict, though he would not appeal to “man’s logic” to find what is finally non-contradictory. Instead there was the further truth which God may or may not have revealed to us. At this point it is rather difficult for anyone conversant in the history of philosophy to not be scratching the chin and wondering whether or not one has just seen a Synthesis progressing from a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between a Thesis and an Antithesis. A mental image may even come to mind of an A at bottom left, and then a ~A standing across at bottom right, and then an arrow moving up and to the right, into the future toward an Absolute: becoming a higher truth than the old logic of being.
What I am saying is not that Van Til was a “closet Hegelian.” I am only suggesting that if we must cut off extra-biblical objects of truth, such as traditional Western logic, then there are not many models left from which to work. There is another clue to this in Van Til’s uneasiness with Schaeffer’s treatment of Hegel.
In several of his books, the student of Van Til spoke of a shift happening with Hegel’s dialectic. Prior to Hegel our thinking was linear and logical. A thing was either true or false, A or ~A, and so forth. Van Til was very clear that it is a mistake to try to fight modern thought with pre-modern (or medieval) thought—for that is only to replace post-Christian autonomy with classical pagan autonomy.
Schaffer got a few things wrong, to be sure, but his basic treatment of Hegel’s legacy was not one of them. And we have a right to wonder how much of the Kantian and Hegelian influence determined the unconscious framework of even very intelligent Christians who had never given themselves to studying what exactly was wrong with these late modern philosophical giants.
There is also an influence from Warfield on the relationship between Calvinism and Christianity. Both held that Calvinism is the most consistent expression of the Christian faith and that for the faith to endure and expand in terms of its implications, it would require its Calvinistic proponents to do that work. Van Til tended to draw this inference with more defensiveness than Warfield. To the degree that a Christian expression was not self-consciously Reformed, such currency would be debased and begin to disintegrate the system. What did Van Til think of Warfield’s criticisms of Kuyper? The Princeton school took a positive approach to apologetics while the Amsterdam school was moving in the opposite direction. At certain points, he argued, “it seems as though Warfield is altogether ignoring the fact that there is a difference of principle between those who work from the basis of regeneration and those who do not.”
Finally there is the influence of Geerhardus Vos. No doubt this concerned the matter of deriving one’s system from the flow of the Bible itself. And yet if anyone will take the trouble to read the prolegomena material of this forerunner of biblical theology, one will find Vos speaking as a classicalist at every point! It is a matter of wonder whether some Van Tillians have carefully read these parts.
Vos drew a sharp distinction between “pure philosophy” which uses reason properly and “rationalism,” which sets up the individual subject as the authority. He adds that “Biblical theology must likewise recognize the objectivity of the groundwork of revelation. This means that real communications came from God and man ad extra.”
Van Til, Frame, et all will acknowledge the priority of general revelation, but will bristle at speaking of it as consisting in “objects” of the mind — as if to make objective truth independent of “the subject” is the same as to grant those objects independence from any subjective interpretation. On the contrary it is only to distinguish between its exact nature in God’s infinite-subjective interpretation (which is the infallible object) as opposed to the finite subjective interpretation of the creaturely mind.
Clear and Pervasive Goals.
Muether insists that we approach Van Til’s method from within an “ecclesial context.” It may strike us as odd that Machen had taken such trouble to appoint the young Van Til to be the first apologetics professor at Westminster given the elder scholar’s more classical bent. But the two men shared one academic burden in common: that of defending the Confession’s brand of the Reformed faith against the modern worldview. On that score they were two peas in a pod.
Possibly the urgency of getting the new seminary on the map, combined with more controversy with the Presbytery, and then Machen’s sudden death in 1938 — it may be that such myriad circumstances prevented what would have otherwise been an eventual conflict between the two over the doctrine of primal knowledge.
There is a hint of such a potential from some private comments by fellow faculty member Allan MacRae. There may have been “harmful effects” discerned by Machen. But again, those on either side of the debate who think that disagreement was essentially over apologetic method are still not getting to the heart of the matter.
We could put things in this way. In order to carry on the Princetonian efforts at defending orthodoxy against erosion, Van Til restricted apologetics to that dogmatic project. If all that this meant was keeping apologetics firmly within the confines of the biblical system, then there could hardly be debate among the Reformed. On the other hand, what if the Van Tillian dogmatic restriction of apologetics began to sacrifice rational epistemology per se? What if, in an otherwise commendable fixation to prevent “autonomous reasoning” and “neutral nature,” we begin to equivocate the terms of “universal truth” (i.e. over all) as if everything in its class really must mean “commonly conceived truth” (i.e. in all or by all)? This is precisely how presuppositionalism has taught its devotees to define natural theology in general and natural law in particular: as if the field of “nature” was claiming to be true by virtue of its agreeableness to the relevant pool of finite minds. But this is precisely not what natural theology and natural law had always meant in the classical model. No doubt the Enlightenment thinkers began to speak of natural theology and natural law as principles of common reason, by which the subject (the reason-er) was on center stage.
This inward turn of epistemology, which finds its wellspring in Kant, is what so concerned critics of Van Til among the Reformed. I am not here interested in criticisms of presuppositionalism from contemporary theistic philosophers who are largely Arminian or Roman Catholic. For the most part they are guilty as charged; nor have they taken the trouble to actually read Van Til and his school with any seriousness. In many cases they have never read him at all. Rather I mean to dust off the shelf what Dr. Sproul had in mind, in the opening remarks of his debate with Bahnsen: namely, that the Van Tillian school of thought brings us perilously near something like Neo-Orthodoxy: their forefather’s critique of “Barthianism” notwithstanding.
A small puzzle piece of modern church history remains. Why did Machen so delight in having Van Til lead the charge at the new Westminster Seminary, despite their potential differences? The most obvious answer is that their methods did not differ so much after all. That is one possible answer. However that may have been true, I think that the answer has more to do with the primacy of place given to the younger man’s stated intentions to defend the truth of the Confession as a whole. In other words, it would seem that Machen’s reservations about Van Til’s epistemology were set aside by Van Til’s heresiology. Machen would not live to see whether his bargain would pay off.
By treating the worth of ideas as “all or nothing” propositions, Van Tillian epistemology trains its devotees to reject much that is valuable in individual theologians and traditions that cannot tow the Van Til line across the board. There are good and bad ways to think in terms of the total system.
The fact that Bahnsen claimed Van Til as the genesis of his reconstructionist brand of theonomy and that Jay Adams would do the same for his nouthetic counseling does not prove that we should lay all the blame that we want to assign at the feet of Van Til. On the other hand, the lines of inference are not coincidental.
Appendix 2 - Hope for a Future Synthesis?
What do you “Start With?” An Exercise in Talking Past Each Other
Apparently leading up to their 1991 debate on all these matters, R. C. Sproul and Greg Bahnsen concluded to each other in a private conversation that there was a whole lot talking past each other. When one is talking about metaphysics, the other is talking about method; when one switches back to the other, now the other is talking about moral obligation, ad infinitum. Not that these spheres of thought can be divorced from each other, but without distinguishing them we can be as uncharitable as we are inaccurate. That is one of the great recurring viruses embedded into the modern history of this debate. When warring schools of apologetics draw attention to “starting point” they typically (though not exclusively) tend to focus on the subjective starting point: (1) How is he defining that word / understanding that concept? or else (2) What are his assumptions behind that line of reasoning? or else (3) What are his ultimate presuppositions upon which the whole thing rests? It is to Van Til’s credit especially that such focus has been paid to that third question of subjective starting point. However it is an epistemological tragedy that the objective starting point is lost in the shuffle.
In fact the words “objective starting point” are less helpful than saying what classical thinkers are really trying to get back to, and that is the necessary preconditions for any particular thing. That necessary precondition is an object of knowledge, and as such is not a mere subjective perspective. It is perceived via subjective perspective, but it cannot be reduced to that perspective without implying total agnosticism.
Beyond starting points are “end points.” What are we driving at in our interaction with the world? Van Til argues from Romans 1:20 that nothing less than “total surrender” is mandated. The unbeliever already knows deep down not simply that “there is a God,” but the very God who is. Sproul would agree with that. But from the same principle the classicalist will see fruit in common experience and the Van Tillians will insist that this God and his terms of peace can only be found in Scripture. Since both sides really do affirm the opposite proposition, the difference is one of emphasis. Consequently, the distance between them can perhaps be overcome. In apologetics, that is. What presuppositionalism has done to a "Christian theory of knowledge" is a devastation that will take a generation and clear-sighted leadership at the seminaries to overcome.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Frame, John. Cornelius Van Til: An Assessment of His Thought. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 1995
Frame, John. Van Til: the Theologian. Phillipsburg, NJ: Pilgrim Publishing Co. 1976
Muether, John R. Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 2008
Sproul, R. C., John Gerstner, & Arthur Lindsley. Classical Apologetics. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan. 1984
Van Til, Cornelius. A Christian Theory of Knowledge. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 1969
Van Til, Cornelius. Christian Apologetics. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 2003
Van Til, Cornelius. An Introduction to Systematic Theology. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing. 2007
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