(PDF) A Van Til Glossary

A Van Til Glossary Nathan D. Shannon & José Ángel Ramirez Version June 2025 A priori: This is a Latin phrase meaning “from before” or “from the previous.” It refers to knowledge that is acquired without new evidence or information. For example, the fact that all squares have four sides is known a priori, and so is the fact that all apples are fruit. No evidence is needed beyond what is already provided. A priori is distinguished from a posteriori. A posteriori: This is a Latin phrase meaning “from what is later.” The phrase is used to describe knowledge that is based upon acquired evidence. An example might be the fact that bananas are sweet. We would need to taste a few bananas to confirm this claim. A priori and a posteriori are common terms in logic and philosophy. Absolute Personality: Van Til speaks frequently of God as “absolute person” or “absolute personality.” In speaking this way, he wishes to deny that there is any impersonality in God. According to trinitarian theology, God is personal. He is Father, Son, and Spirit, not an impersonal something or other without identity. Impersonality in God would mean darkness and mystery. If there were impersonality in God, God would not know himself, and we could never be sure that what he has revealed about himself in Scripture and in nature is really true. Van Til also wants to subvert non-Christian philosophical notions of absoluteness, which is often taken to mean unconditioned, unspecified, and unknowable, and of personality, which would mean self-conscious and therefore distinguished from other things and therefore limited in being and in knowledge. The God of the Bible, Father, Son, and Spirit, is both absolute (selfexistent, self-sufficient, self-contained) and personal (thinking, speaking, acting, loving, judging, and knowable).1 Ad hominem: “Ad hominem” is a Latin phrase meaning “to the person”. It refers to a fallacy of informal logic in which one attacks the one making a claim rather than responding to the content of the claim itself. For example, saying “don’t believe him, he is a liar” is an ad hominem attack if one does not respond to the actual argument. This type of reasoning is considered fallacious because the truth or falsity of a proposition does not depend on the character of the asserter. Interestingly, in Van Til’s apologetics there is a legitimate and non-fallacious use of the ad hominem. In fact, this type of argument even appears in Scripture: in Romans 2, Paul points out that Jews who accuse others of sinning condemn themselves because they commit the same sins. They are right, but they fall into hypocrisy. In 1 John 4, the apostle affirms that whoever claims to love God but hates his brother is a liar. Both cases evidence an internal inconsistency in the subject. This type of ad hominem, to which Van Til appeals, consists in showing that the 1 See Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 47-52; Nathan D. Shannon, Absolute Person and Moral Experience: A Study in Neo-Calvinism (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022); “Van Til on God as Absolute Person: Origin, Meaning, and Function,” in The Future of Reformed Apologetics Collected Essays on Applying Van Til’s Apologetic Method to a New Generation (Glenside: Westminster Seminary Press, 2024), 155-172. 1 unbeliever’s worldview is self-destructive from within, due to contradictions between what he affirms and what he actually presupposes or practices. Van Til thus maintains that the unbeliever can say true things, but he cannot give an adequate reason for them from his own worldview. In that sense, he knows true things, but he does not truly know them, because he affirms them from a system that denies the God who makes them possible. This use of ad hominem is not a personal attack, but a form of reductio ad absurdum argument (see Reductio ad absurdum) that leads the interlocutor to confront the untenability of his starting point. This apologetic approach has a legitimate and pastoral use because it leads the sinner to see that his intellectual house is built with foreign materials and confronts him with the need to repent and submit to divine revelation.2 One aspect that should not be overlooked is that this apologetic use of ad hominem is not new with Van Til. For example, Scott Oliphint and William Edgar show that Church Fathers such as Aristides, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus or Tertullian used this type of argumentation.3 Francis Turretin (1623-1687) classifies his arguments again and again as ad hominem.4 The Reformed orthodox Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) states the following: For the refutation of the false theology of the Gentiles, it was rightly argued from themselves. It was, indeed, an argument not elaborate, but of no little weight: taken from their own testimonies and witnesses against themselves, whereby, if they did not wish to be convinced, they could not at least fail to feel that their cause was hopeless, pushed to the limit by contradictions, and consequently reduced to absurdity. [...] errors were refuted ... ad hominem.5 In this way, he says: “the writings of the Fathers and of recent writers such as Eugubinus, Mornay du Plessis, Mutius Pansa, etc., should be read and understood in favor of the Christian religion.”6 All-conditioner: In his autobiographical essay, “Why I Believe in God,” Van Til refers to God as the “all-conditioner.” This language refers to the asymmetrical character of the Creatorcreature relationship. God is not conditioned, or changed or affected, by the creation, while on the other hand the creation is created by God, upheld by God, and guided by God to its appointed end. All meaning in the world comes from God. He is the ultimate reference point for the world 2 K. Scott Oliphint, “The Consistency of Van Til’s Epistemology,” Westminster Theological Journal 52 (1990): 27-49; Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1998), 116, 468, 492; Michael W. Payne, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narratives, And Apologetics: The Ad Hominem Once More,” Westminster Theological Journal 64, no. 1 (2002): 95-117. 3 See: Edgar, William and K. Scott Oliphint, Christian Apologetics Past and Present: A Primary Source Reader (Volume 1, To 1500). Wheaton, Il: Crossway Books, 2009. 4 See Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 2, Eleventh Through Seventeenth Topics, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1994), T. II, Q. XVI, XXXVI; T. III, Q. I, XXI; T. XV, Q. 6, III. 5 Gisbertus Voetius, Diatribae de theologia, philologia, historia & philosophia, sacra cum indice locorum quorundam Script. & Syllabo mater. ac quaestion. philosophico-theologicarum (apud Simonem de Vries, 1668), Part Two, chap. VIII, resp. Johanne Morris,34-35. Translation original. Available at the Post-Reformation Digital Library. 6 Voetius, Diatribae de theologia, philologia, historia & philosophia, 35. Translation original. 2 and for the life of all creatures. He conditions, or characterizes, everything.7 From the creature’s point of view, this asymmetry means a radical theocentrism (Rom 11:36). Analogy, analogical reasoning: For Van Til, this is the idea that God is the original and the creature is derived from God and dependent upon God. With regarding specifically to knowledge and reason, God knows his creation as only he can know it. God knows all things in a single, eternal instant. The human creature, on the other hand, comes to know himself and the world around him through processes of observation, reasoning, and growing in wisdom and understanding. His cognitive life retraces the knowledge of God on a creaturely level. His knowledge is therefore analogous to God’s. Scott Oliphint has said that we may think of the Creator, the I AM, as the original, and the image-bearer as the analogue. Van Til also describes man’s moral character as analogous to the moral perfection of God. Thomas Aquinas and others explained that the things that we say about God cannot apply to God in exactly the way that they apply to creatures. ‘God is good’ cannot mean exactly the same thing as ‘Cornelius is good’. This is called “univocal predication,” and it is rejected. On the hand, we cannot say that ‘God is good’ and ‘Cornelius is good’ mean utterly different things, lest we be unable to say anything at all about God. This idea of “equivocal predication” must also be rejected. There must be some resemblance, so that we can speak intelligibly about God, but there must not be perfect identity, because God is God and the creature is the creature. Aquinas called this resemblance, “analogy.” Anti-theism: For Van Til, anti-theism is not simply the explicit denial of God, such as we find in militant atheism. Rather, it is any form of thought that, at its starting point (see Starting Point), excludes God as the ultimate and necessary reference for knowing any fact of the universe. In that sense, all non-theism is anti-theism. Anti-theism manifests itself in philosophies which, although they may speak of “God” or some absolute principle, do not recognize him as the triune, self-sufficient creator who gives meaning to all reality. For example, classical Greek philosophy—especially in Plato and Aristotle—is for Van Til an early expression of anti-theistic thought, because its starting point was not God as Creator, but an impersonal, eternal reality that existed alongside God or even above him. This leads them to a view of the universe where God and man are in correlation (See Correlative), thus denying the absolute dependence of every creature on God. Van Til emphasizes the fact that the true antithesis is not between the religious and the secular, but between Christian theism and every system of thought that does not begin with the revelation of God in Scripture. That is why he affirms that anti-theism is not only a philosophical stance, but also a spiritual stance: it is the active suppression of the knowledge of God that every man possesses, as taught in Romans 1. The anti-theist, then, not only opposes the triune God, but tries to construct a vision of the world without Him, appealing to a supposed autonomy of reason or of facts. This leads him to interpret reality on his own terms, denying, in fact, the revelation of God both in creation and in Scripture. For Van Til the division of thought is simple; one is either a theist or an anti-theist.8 7 8 See Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 121-143. Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, nd), chs. 9, 11. 3 Antithesis: Antithesis is opposition. Two things which are antithetical are opposed to one another. They are, on a basic level, irreconcilable. Now, two baseball teams are opposed to another. But this is not antithesis because they are in agreement regarding the rules of baseball. Their opposition affirms a basic agreement. Now suppose we had a baseball team and a rugby team; now we have an antithesis. They cannot even agree upon the rules or even the basic structure of the game. They cannot even get a conversation started. With this example, we’re getting closer to “antithesis” as Van Til uses the term, but we’re not quite there yet. Abraham Kuyper talked highlighted the antithesis between regenerate and unregenerate principles and thus between regenerate and unregenerate cultures. One culture expresses doxology and seeks to glorify God and enjoy him in and through human flourishing. The other culture expresses rejection of God in the form of the development of a culture supposedly autonomous. The unregenerate seeks to glorify himself, even in God’s world and God’s presence. Likewise, Van Til uses the term “antithesis” to refer to the irreconcilability, the basic enmity, between Christian and non-Christian thought.9 One final piece: the asymmetry of the Creator/creature distinction. Key to Van Til’s thought and to neo-Calvinism, and indeed to biblical Christian theism, is the irreducible asymmetry of the antithesis. Regenerate and unregenerate are not two teams hoping to play different sports, as though they were two opposed but equal worldviews. Rather, one teams wants to glory and enjoy God through the works of God; the other wants to subvert and destroy God’s reputation by claiming all good things for itself. One affirms God as God, the other, affirms the creature as God. An embryonic instance of this antithesis can already be seen in Augustine, when he speaks of two cities built by two opposing loves: the love of God and the love of self. Although Van Til does not develop this connection extensively, his Reformed view of history and culture is in continuity with this Augustinian line. Apologetics: According to Van Til, apologetics is “the vindication of the Christian world and life view against all forms of the non-Christian world and life view.”10 Scott Oliphint says that apologetics is “the application of biblical truth to unbelief.”11 Authority of the expert: Knowledge and belief depend upon certainty. In fact, we are accustomed to distinguishing between “knowledge” and “belief” based upon degrees of precisely that, certainty. But what is certainty? Certainty depends upon some kind of authority. If I tell you that my name is “David Hume,” perhaps you will believe me, perhaps not. If I show you an identification card issued by the department of transportation of the state of Pennsylvania, with the name “David Hume” next to my picture, then you would probably have more confidence. You might even say that with the help of this ID card you now “know” that my name is David Hume. In this case, the department of transportation of the state of Pennsylvania is the authority which provides certainty for your level of confidence in the claim that my name is David Hume. In sum, certainty is a basic epistemological value, and certainty is underwritten by authority.12 9 See John M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of his Thought (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1995), 187-213. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed., ed. William Edgar (2003), 17. 11 K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of our Faith (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 29. 12 Western philosophy, going all the way back to the Greeks, has always been conscious of certainty as an epistemic value and of certainty as underwritten by some kind of authority or self-attesting point of reference. It may help to recognize that epistemologies in other contexts—classical Chinese philosophy, to choose an example at 10 4 Now to the point. Van Til says that without the authority of the Word of God, the unbeliever must depend upon the authority of the people who have, or claim to have, the best understanding. The unbeliever finds certainty by submitting to the authority of someone who is or is believed to be better informed, rather than to God as the very criterion of truth. Interestingly depending upon man, in and of itself, is not the problem. In fact, we should, indeed we must, depend upon other people. We will receive no help directly from heaven when trying to understand the causes of the first world war or decide whether to pack shorts or a sweater or identify all the necessary ingredients for that dessert your grandmother used to make. The problem, then, is not depending upon the human perspective but depending exclusively or ultimately upon the human perspective, which is a losing game, a guaranteed epistemic collapse. But the unbeliever, having rejected the self-attesting authority of the self-attesting God, has no other option. And there is irony in that because by nature human existence and human knowledge are preceded by the being and knowledge of God. The unbeliever is committed to the impossible mission of trying to demonstrate the dispensability of God even as he depends upon God every moment. The authority of the expert is still only a human authority, and so there is no real submission to authority, but only agreement. Autonomy: Autonomy means self-rule, or, negatively, it is the rejection of law or authority external to the self. We might associate this with the Enlightenment or with Western individualism. While there is truth to this in a political and sociological sense, the autonomy Van Til speaks of is the autonomy of sin which dates not to the 18th century but to Genesis 3:6. In Van Til and in Reformed theology, autonomy means sinful independence from God. Two kinds of autonomy deserve attention: epistemological and moral, which, though we distinguish them, in fact each implies the other. Van Til speaks often of “autonomous reason.” The phrase refers to interpretation of the world that makes no reference to the Word of God, but operates independently of God and refuses to acknowledge God as God. When Eve decided to re-evaluate God’s Word regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she became an autonomous thinker, judging all things, even the Word of God, by her own reason. Van Til would say that in this sort of autonomy the human person is both the starting point and the ultimate reference point of his or her reasoning. It is worth noting that the unbeliever, whose reasoning is autonomous, will in fact honor some forms of external epistemic authority, but only as far as doing so is acceptable to him. His submission to authority is actually a form of partnership. We notice, for example, that Eve saw that the fruit of the tree was pleasing to the sight (Gen 3:6). According to Genesis 2:9, she was right. Nonetheless, her assessment of the tree in Genesis 3:6 was not made in obedience to God but autonomously. Ever since the fall, the state of sin has been characterized by a rejection of the word and the law of God as the word and the law of God, and insistence upon interpreting the world independently of God. Although the idea here is epistemological (intellectual) autonomy, clearly it has moral implications. We may also consider moral autonomy, though it too has epistemological implications. 1 John 3:4 says that “sin is lawlessness.” The idea is that sin is when sinners do what is right “in their own eyes.” Doing what is right in one’s own eyes is self-rule or self-governance. Notice random—may express these things in different ways because they have different priorities, just as Western ethics and Western metaphysics utilize methods suited to their particular tasks without necessarily identifying the relevant epistemic structures and priorities. 5 that “in their own eyes” is language of interpretation, opinion, and judgment. It is epistemological language, with reference to morality. As an example, one might wonder why in the garden of Eden eating a piece of fruit meant so much. In fact, the fall had little to do with the fruit itself. The main issue was, who is king here? Who has the right to rule? Who makes the rules? The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represented governance and moral sovereignty. It stood for the fact that moral right and wrong revolved around obedience or disobedience to the Creator-King, to God himself. Transgression of God’s law therefore represented a rejection of the basic principle of law, that the law is God’s law, and that righteousness is righteousness before God. Sin rejects God’s law because it is God’s and not ‘mine’ and replaces it with moral autonomy. This is why James can say that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (Jas 2:10). In sum, autonomy refers to epistemological or moral independence from God and as such it represents sin itself. Blockhouse methodology: “Blockhouse methodology” is Van Til’s term for apologetic methods which build up to Christianity step by step. Specifically, they begin by defending a generic theism, which means the existence of a supernatural being without any specific identity. These methods defend a non-specific theism and only afterward move on to add the specific details of Christian theism. It is supposed that to turn the atheist (or the polytheist) into a theist is to take an important step toward Christianity. Christian theism then completes generic theism. It is sometimes said that generic theism belongs to the realm of nature, meaning that it is accessible or demonstrable to anyone and everyone, no conversion or special revelation necessary, while Christian theism—Trinity and incarnation and so on—belong to the realm of grace and come to us via special revelation. This is the Roman Catholic idea that “grace perfects nature,” meaning that the function of grace is simply to complete nature. Thomas Aquinas developed and defended this method. Van Til rejected it for several reasons. He believed that a generic god is in fact an idol of man’s own making and no god at all, and that there could be no cooperation between regenerate and unregenerate reason. A god which man would agree to believe in would surely be no god at all. Grace must not perfect but renew nature. Van Til also argued that when we extract one doctrine from the whole of Christian theism, that doctrine loses its meaning. We therefore must defend Christian theism in its entirety, as a complete system. Borrowed capital: The unbeliever knows true things—many, of course—because he himself is a bit of truth surrounded by truth. Despite himself, he knows God truly and he is surrounded by revelation of God, though he suppresses this truth and replaces it with idols of his own making. And yet, while knowing true things, he does not know anything truly. That is, he does not know anything according to God and his word. Christian theism says that the self-existent God created the world and upholds the world including the human being, and that all things—including the human being and human cognition—are from him, through him, and to him. Meanwhile, the unbeliever rejects all this. His starting point, his most basic assumption, is the negation of this basic framework of Christian truth. This means that his philosophy of life is based upon a primal rejection of the essential truths that make a meaningful existence possible. Van Til therefore says that if the unbeliever were completely consistent with his own foundational ideas, he would not know anything at all. Thus the strange state of affairs: the unbeliever knows many things, but he knows nothing truly. 6 What do we say, then, regarding the true knowledge that the unbeliever has? The true things known and utilized by the unbeliever may be referred to as “borrowed capital,” or even “stolen capital,” since, based on his own commitments—his rejection of the one true God who gives to all mankind life and breath and everything (Acts 17:25)—he has no right to believe or assert any truth at all, and he has no explanation for the things which he knows and enjoys. He is left to borrow (or steal) from Christian truth. His assertions of truth, his moral seriousness, his confidence in science, logic, and the laws of nature, his experiences of beauty and the arts, and so on, are all borrowed capital. Brute fact: A brute fact, as Van Til uses the term, is a bit of reality without origin, meaning, or interpretation, without connection to any other facts. It simply is. Van Til says that there are no brute facts because every fact was known by God before it was a fact, every fact is upheld by God, every fact is what it is because of the perfect knowledge and eternal will of God. There would be no facts, and therefore no knowledge of facts, were it not for God, his decree, creation, and providence—Christian theism as such. The point is that truth and meaning come from God and therefore must be understood with reference to God. Epistemologically speaking, true knowledge of the world presupposes God as the self-existent one who gives meaning to the world. The human being should, therefore, interpret the world always with reference to God. In learning about the world and in thinking about ourselves, we think God’s thoughts after him. By contrast, Van Til argues that non-Christian thought is left by its rejection of Christian theism to suppose that the facts of the world have no meaning until they are interpreted by man. The unbeliever interprets the world with reference only to himself, not with reference to God. No meaning precedes man; man is the giver of meaning, and what man cannot understand cannot be understood. Certainty: Something is certain if it is beyond doubt. As opposed to likelihood or probability, which came be more or less, higher or lower, certainty does not admit of degrees. One is certain or not certain. Certainty is a basic epistemological desideratum. That is, it is a chief value for the life of the mind. But certainty can also be attributed to events. A future event may be certain— sure to happen—or uncertain—might or might not happen. Note that epistemic certainty and historical certainty are distinguishable. The future return of Christ, for example, is certain, while one’s belief in the future return of Christian may not enjoy certainty. Van Til argued that Christian truth is certain and should be presented as a certainty, not as a mere probability. Chance: “Chance” refers to randomness, or to the idea that the reason for an event or a state of affairs cannot be identified or understood. A product of chance (such as an event or state of affairs) has no cause or explanation; it is causeless and therefore meaningless. Van Til associates chance with irrationality (unintelligibility), and he says that all non-Christian thought is caught in a dialectic of rationality (intelligibility) and irrationality, chance and determinism. Non-Christian thought always strives to explain the world and human experience but must always concede that it is ultimately incapable of doing so, and without God the limit of human reason is the limit of reason itself. The finite mind floats precariously on a limitless sea of the dark unknown. Conversely, Van Til believes that there is no place for chance, or for the truly irrational, in Christian thought, because there is nothing that God does not know, and God is truth. The God of Scripture foreordained whatsoever comes to pass. Therefore, every fact in the universe is what it is, and means what it means, because of the eternal and immutable plan of God. The finite, 7 human mind will never exhaustively comprehend the universe, or even itself. In fact, the finite, human mind cannot exhaustively understand anything at all, although it can know many things truly. But behind it all is the infinite and eternal God who knows himself perfectly. Classical apologetics: Classical apologetics is philosophical apologetics. It focuses on the ontological argument of Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and the five ways of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the first three of which are considered versions of the cosmological argument. These arguments still garner a great deal of interest today, and nearly every influential Western philosopher or theologian has opined on them. Immanuel Kant’s critiques are nearly as well known as the arguments themselves. One common critique is that the classical arguments defend a bare or generic theism—some kind of deity, but none in particular—and that they are, therefore, not distinctly Christian. Some defenders reject this criticism, others acknowledge it, believing in a step-by-step apologetic for which generic theism is a valid and important step toward Christian theism. (See “blockhouse methodology.”) Van Til’s view is that Christian theism is the only true theism, and that classical arguments, used in direct argumentation, do not, because for various reasons they cannot, demonstrate the existence of any God whatsoever. Argumentation which does not acknowledge the antithesis and challenge the unbeliever’s rational autonomy can only affirm a finite god, which is precisely the sort of god that the unbeliever can accept because a finite god cannot speak with absolute authority. Van Til does endorse, however, the use of such arguments within the context of a presuppositional or covenantal apologetic. Circular argument: A circular argument, or circular reasoning, is an argument in which the conclusion of the argument is included, whether explicitly or implicitly, in its premises. A circular argument assumes what it claims to prove. This is the informal logical fallacy of begging the question. It has been said that Van Til’s approach to apologetics commits this fallacy because it refuses to treat Christian theism as a hypothesis and prefers to stand by its certainty. This is indeed Van Til’s method. He advocates for indirect argumentation rather than direct argumentation because he believes that if Christianity were not true, no argumentation at all would be possible. Christianity must be presupposed, at least implicitly, in order for any argumentation to take place. Therefore, to make a direct argument for Christianity is to grant two false claims, that it is possible to think logically on the supposition that God might not exist and that the God of Christianity is ready to honor the logical expectations of the unbeliever. Van Til refuses to surrender the certainty of Christianity, thus the objection of circular argumentation. There are several responses available from Van Til’s point of view. One is that all reasoning is circular because all reasoning must take something as self-evident. All reasoning, in other words, is based upon something which it does not question but simply takes for granted, as obviously true, as indubitable. Sometimes this is sense perception, sometimes it is our own reasoning faculties, sometimes it is the laws of logic. In that sense, the objection condemns itself since what it claims is that the laws of argumentation have been violated, even while one cannot ‘prove’ the laws of logic without using those laws. A second point is that in the case of Christianity, God is the beginning, or the center, of the circle, and he is self-existent. The circle of Christian reasoning, if there is one, begins not with man but with God, therefore it is not circular in a fallacious sense but rather theocentric. God is self-defined, and all things are from him and through him and to him. Necessarily, then, all things, including apologetics, refer back to him. 8 Coherence theory: In philosophy, coherence theory is a theory about the nature of truth. It asserts that a belief or proposition is true if it fits harmoniously within a total system of beliefs. That is, a statement is true to the extent that it is consistent with all other statements one accepts. This theory contrasts with the correspondence theory, which identifies truth with the conformity of a proposition to external reality. In idealist systems, such as those of Kant or Hegel, this theory acquired great force. For them, to truly know something is not simply to verify whether a proposition conforms to a particular fact, but to understand its place within the whole. Knowledge requires understanding how a given fact fits within the whole system of thought or reality. Van Til, however, offers a profound criticism of this view: coherence without God is only an illusion of unity. He insists that only biblical Christianity offers real coherence, because part of the triune, self-conscious and absolute God, whose thought is the source of all truth. Human ideas are true only when they correspond to the thought of God, who is internally coherent. Thus, the Christian theory of coherence is not a human construct, but a submission of the intellect to the mind of God revealed in Scripture. Real coherence exists only if it begins with God as its starting point. If all knowledge is an analogy of divine knowledge, then also every true system will be coherent insofar as it reflects the absolute coherence of divine thought.13 See also Correspondence theory. Common grace: The work of God whereby, without regenerating the heart of man, he restrains the total development of sin in both individuals and society, and permits some manifestation of order, righteousness, beauty, and truth in the fallen world. Van Til regards this doctrine as inseparable from a sound Reformed theology, for only one who affirms God’s absolute sovereignty over history can genuinely ask what things, if any, the believer and the unbeliever have in common. According to Van Til (following Kuyper), common grace has both a negative aspect (restraint of sin) and a positive aspect (preservation of creation). However, unlike special grace, common grace does not change the human heart, nor does it reconcile the sinner to God. Man remains hostile to God, even when he acts with civility or order. It is important to avoid two common misunderstandings of this doctrine. First, it is not common grace that gives man his creative, rational, or governing capacities. These belong to man’s original design as the image of God and predate the fall. Common grace does not introduce new faculties but limits the corruption of existing ones.14 Second, it is not correct to say that common grace prevents a total suppression of the knowledge of God. The revelation of God is inevitable and inescapable; man always receives it, and suppression does not eliminate knowledge, but rather intensifies its distortion. To suggest that common grace is what stops complete suppression would imply that there must be common grace in hell or in demons, which Van Til rejects as absurd.15 13 Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, chs. 1, 13. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 2nd ed., ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2015), 21-27. 15 Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2008), 188-190. 14 9 Common ground: Common ground would be that which believer and unbeliever have in common, making it possible for them to engage in meaningful apologetic discussion. Classical and evidential apologetics assume that reason and empirical evidence, respectively, constitute common ground. Van Til’s view is that metaphysically, believer and unbeliever have everything in common, while epistemologically, they have nothing in common. The metaphysical is where we find ourselves—in God’s world—and what we are, namely, the image of God. Van Til says that “God is man’s ultimate environment,” meaning that man’s context, including man’s own nature, speaking to him constantly about God.16 And yet the believer and the unbeliever react in very different ways to the God who is presented in and around us. The unbeliever reacts in hostility, suppressing the revelation of God and replacing God with various substitutes. The believer is made willing and able to respond in obedience and to glorify and enjoy the God whose glory is declared all around him. Is there, therefore, common ground between the believer and the unbeliever? There is indeed ample common ground, but that common ground is always contested. Common ground, yes; neutral ground, no. Common notions: See “common ground.” Van Til’s dictum that metaphysically believer and unbeliever have everything in common, while epistemologically they have nothing in common, is key. The question then is whether “notion” refers to the metaphysical or to the epistemological. In some cases, a common notion is an idea or a concept that is given by God or which refers to an objective state of affairs. In this case, Van Til would say that something like this is common between believer and unbeliever because it constitutes part of our shared metaphysical situation. By contrast, if a “notion” is an interpretation or an understanding of reality, draw up in response to the objective, metaphysical situation, then Van Til would deny that such a notion could be common. Contingency: Something that may or may not be, or something that may or may not happen, or something that is or has happened but might have been or might not have happened, is contingent. Contingency is contrasted with necessity. Sometimes Van Til uses the word “contingency” to refer to chance—the arbitrary, the irrational, the inexplicable. For the Christian, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as chance. The unbeliever, however, cannot, despite his constant efforts, expunge chance from his worldview. Van Til says that for this reason the unbeliever, no matter how rational he may strive to be, will always have to entertain the irrational. Correlative: Correlative means that two things are mutually dependent or mutually constitutive. Two things make each other what they are. Uniquely, Christianity affirms that God and the world are not correlative, which means that the relationship between the Creator and creation is asymmetrical. God does not depend upon anything outside of himself to be what or who he is. Nothing makes God God. Van Til argues that all non-Christian thought, non-Christian thought as such, always thinks of God and the world as correlative. In fact, the unbeliever may be open to believing in a god, but that God will never be the self-defined, self-existent, self-attesting God of Scripture. Correspondence theory: In the philosophical tradition, this is the theory that a belief is true if it corresponds to external reality. For example, the statement “snow is white” is true if, indeed, 16 Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 65. 10 snow is white in the world outside of the mind. This view, historically associated with realism, defines truth as the correspondence between thought (or language) and objective facts. Van Til accepts the principle of correspondence, but gives it a radically theological twist. For him, truth is not the simple coordination between idea and object, but the conformity of human thought with God’s thought. Authentic correspondence occurs when our ideas reflect God’s ideas of the facts, because only God knows each fact in its totality and in its place within the sovereign plan. Thus, he proposes a Christian theory of correspondence, which does not begin with man as the point of reference, but with God as the source, measure, and norm of all truth. Unlike empiricism or rationalism, the Christian position does not allow man to define what “reality” is without first recognizing that all facts were created, ordered, and interpreted by God from eternity. Therefore, according to Van Til, even the classical theory of correspondence, if assumed independently of God, ends up being a form of anti-theism (see Anti-theism): it presupposes that man can know facts without reference to the Creator. For the Christian, on the other hand, there is no true correspondence between mind and world if there is no correspondence with God’s revealed plan. He stresses that this Christian form of correspondence does not deny that man knows true things; rather, he affirms that his knowledge is true insofar as it is analogous to divine knowledge, and not because it is merely empirically or rationally—autonomously— satisfactory.17 See also Theory of coherence. Creatively constructive: The unbeliever thinks autonomously. That is, he interprets the world with reference to himself. In his thinking and learning and interpreting, he asserts his own autonomy and originality. He constructs truth. He interprets creatively. He considers himself the original and final standard of truth. He adopts illegitimately, in other words, the epistemic posture of God himself. See “receptively reconstructive.” Deductivism / deductive reasoning: Generally speaking, deduction is reasoning from the general to the specific. One example might be: If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. When a deductive argument is sound, its conclusion is not likely but certain. The conclusion, when a deductive argument is successful, cannot be doubted. Deductive reasoning is, of course, useful in theology. It is even mentioned, though somewhat in the Westminster Confession of Faith: “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture . . .” (1.6). Here is an example: if anyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved, and I call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I will be saved. This is not a complete soteriology, but it is a true statement, so long as the terms are understood biblically. However, we should also note that deduction can lead us to incorrect conclusions. There are several reasons for this. For one, God is not a general rule of some kind from which conclusions about God and the world may be deduced reliably. Rather, he is a personal God whose will is his own and often mysterious to us. Second, the Bible contains not one premise but many. This is why we say that it is not wise to build a doctrine on one verse only. In sum, deductive reasoning is a very important tool, but Scripture is authoritative, trustworthy, and true, even when it resists our deductive systems. See also Inductivism/inductive reasoning. 17 Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, chs. 1, 15. 11 Determinism: Determinism has many versions, but the basic idea is that all historical events are pre-determined and everything that happens because of, and only because of, that predetermination. There might appear to be more proximate causes, and we may feel as though our choices are our own, but all of that is illusory and meaningless. Events and human choices are pre-determined. Pre-determination might be supernatural (by God, for example) or it might be due to an unbreakable series of finite causes or perhaps something else. Along with Calvinism generally, Van Til might be considered (or accused of being) a determinist because of the claim that God unchangeably ordained all of history, as we read in Westminster Confession of Faith 3.1: “God, from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.” Van Til even says that “every Christian who commits his future to God believes that God controls the future.”18 But Reformed theology, and Van Til, too, rejects the claim that if there is a comprehensive ultimate determination, such as the decree of God, then finite or proximate causes are illusory. Van Til affirms that God ordained whatsoever comes to pass, but he denies that divine ordination undermines human freedom and the liberty of second causes. Van Til often affirms an interesting point in this regard, that historical causes are not only not undermined by divine ordination but rather established by it. Westminster Confession 3.1 again: God ordained whatsoever happens, “yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures; nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established.” Van Til argues that if it were not for divine ordination of all historical events, including their causes and effects, those historical events would be uninterpretable. They would be random and inexplicable. Divine foreordination does not undermine meaning; it makes meaning possible. Van Til argues that divine ordination of history only makes sense for the triune God and Christian theism. Only a personal God can ordain all of history but also enter into a relationship with the creature so that, for example, Adam could have obeyed, but he disobeyed, with the result that sin and evil entered through the world because of Adam’s choice. Man is to blame rather than God. Some versions of determinism tend to presuppose impersonal causation as ultimate. Van Til argues that impersonal determinism is equivalent to chance. The unbeliever might call it “determinism,” but since it is impersonal it lacks self-consciousness and therefore it lacks purpose and meaning. It is the same as no determination at all. Eminence: The word eminence means the high regard in which a person or thing is held, like fame or special admiration. The high regard we might have for a famous athlete might be an example, or for royalty or a powerful stateman. In theology, eminence is a way of speaking about God or of trying to describe him accurately. It is like trying to find him cognitively. The idea is that God possesses the highest versions of characteristics we are familiar with in ourselves. In fact, God is the source of those characteristics which exist imperfectly in human beings. Human beings exist; God is existence itself. Human beings are strong; God is omnipotent, and so on. These are called “divine perfections.” Eminence is one of Thomas Aquinas’s three means of knowing God, the others being causality and negation. Van Til believes that this method, if not governed by Scripture, yields a finite God, a God comprised of creaturely ideas somewhat exaggerated. Ultimately, this 18 Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2003), 53. 12 method is univocal which means, in a manner of speaking, it speaks rather than listens to God’s revelation. Epistemology: Epistemology is the study of human knowledge—its nature, structure, and limitations. It is one of the three traditional branches of Western philosophy, the other two being ethics and metaphysics. For Van Til, epistemology can include many fields which are sometimes treated separately, such as interpretation, psychology, and consciousness. Equivocal, equivocism: Language about God could be equivocal, univocal, or analogous, based upon how we understand the actual metaphysical relationship between God and ourselves, or between God and creation. Van Til taught explained equivocism by referring to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who taught that “everything flows,” or “all is change.” He purportedly stated that one “never steps into the same river twice.” The idea is that while there appears to be a kind of coherence and cohesion to reality and to experience, in fact this is an illusion. Underneath it all nothing remains what it is. Reality is constant change. I might talk about “this dog” and “that dog,” but using the word “dog” twice is misleading. I cannot actually have knowledge of “this” and “that” via a concept of “dog” because there are no such stable concepts nor are there stable things which can instantiate or represent such a concept, even if there were one. In terms of theology, if God and the world were, in this Heraclitean way, radically, irreducibly different, we would have no way of referring to God or talking intelligibly about him. God would be unknowable. Van Til says that there is an analogy between the Creator and the creature so that we can know God truly but never exhaustively. Ethics: Ethics is the study of human behavior and of right and wrong. Ethics can be a descriptive study of what a person or community tends to consider right and wrong, or ethics can be a prescriptive undertaking, seeking to determine right and wrong in different situations. The latter is more common and tends to focus on decision-making. Ethical reasoning often consists of a general principle and the tricky task of applying that principle in complex situations. Broadly speaking, emphasis will fall on either the motive (such as virtues or character), the means (by following rules, for example), or the end (the intended result). There is also a more philosophical division of ethics which studies the nature of ethical predicates such as “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “evil.” This study is sometimes called metaethics. Evidence: “Evidence” refers to the reasons or the data used to support a conclusion or a line of reasoning, for which the evidence must be both relevant and sufficient. Evidence can be philosophical (conceptual) or empirical (factual). Empirical evidence may be the facts themselves or statements of the facts. At times, Van Til uses the word “evidence,” or “evidences,” to refer specifically to empirical evidence, while at other times he uses the word more broadly to refer to reasons, whether empirical or philosophical. Van Til is sometimes accused of fideism, which would that he rejects the use of reason or evidence in apologetics. This is simply not true. Van Til affirms the use of evidence in apologetics. He affirms the use of reason, facts, and data. However, he rejects evidentialism as an apologetic method, and the difference, though often overlooked, is important. Van Til believes in the use of evidence within a presuppositional or covenantal apologetic, for the purposes of indirect argumentation which first subverts the unbeliever’s view 13 and then, afterward, turns to present the Christian perspective in its fullness. Evidentialist apologetics, on the other hand, uses direct argumentation and seeks to establish the truth of Christianity, or, in the case of empirical evidence, its high probability, on the basis of evidence. One example would be historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ. Van Til points out several problems with this method. First, evidential argumentation can only establish probability, never certainty, while Christianity is not probably true but certainly true. Faith in the saving power of the resurrection is not a measured risk; it is conviction. We do not believe the biblical witness of the apostles to the resurrection based on evidential statistics but based upon the self-attesting authority of the inspired Word of God (WCF 1.4, 1.5). Second, evidence can change. The evidence we use today may turn out to be unreliable or unpersuasive tomorrow. But we are assured that while “the grass withers” and “the flower fades,” “the word of our God remains forever” (Isa 40:8). Third, even if we were to establish a very high probability that Christ was raised from the dead, we would still have the problem of demonstrating the meaning of his resurrection. Fundamentally, Van Til’s view is that evidentialism misunderstands the task of apologetics. It seems to suggest that the task of apologetics is to persuade someone of a certain degree of probability of one biblical claim or another. Van Til believes that the task of apologetics is to address the problem of sin by bringing the unbeliever face to face with the futility of his ways and then to wait upon the Holy Spirit to convict him of sin so that he will receive the gospel.19 See also “classical apologetics.” Fact: A fact is state of affairs, meaning, the way things are in reality. It is a fact that my mug is empty. Alternatively, a fact might be a bit of data, such as a declarative sentence, which reflects reality: “my mug is empty.” See “brute fact” above. Fideism: Fideism is the belief that God is known by faith and not by reason, rather than by reason or by a reasonable faith. In fact, fideism is more often an accusation than a preferred option. The idea is that one must believe without or even despite reason. Fideistic faith is sometimes described as an irrational act of the will aimed at affirming certain truth claims without evidence or even despite evidence to the contrary. Van Til is sometimes accused of fideism, even though he repudiates it often and claims that we have the most certain philosophical proof for Christianity, namely, that without it nothing else makes sense.20 Full-bucket problem: God is all-glorious. He is self-sufficient. This means that nothing outside of him, nothing other than God himself, makes God who he is, and nothing can be added to him or in any way increase God or make him greater, “as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25). God did indeed create the world for his own glory, but not because he lacked or needed glory. And yet, God calls on creatures to glorify him. Van Til said, therefore, that glorifying God was like trying to add water to a full bucket. Van Til points out that the full bucket problem applies to God’s knowledge and will as well, since God’s knowledge would appear to increase just as the objects of his will increase, from himself alone at first and then to include creation. 19 For more on evidence, see Frame, Cornelius Van Til, 177-184; and Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Evidences, 2nd ed., ed. K. Scott Oliphint (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2016). 20 See Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 77-82. 14 Implication: The word implication has at least three standard uses. First, it refers to a logical relationship of necessity. If one thing, then another, every time and without exception. “Implication” means that one thing implies another when that one thing is never without the other thing. For example, ‘X implies Y’ means that there is no X that is without Y. The word “implication” refers to that relationship. It is important to notice that ‘X implies Y’ does not mean that ‘Y implies X’. Second, the word “implication” can also refer to the thing implied. In this case, the implication of X is Y. Finally, the word “implication” or the verb “to imply” is often used loosely to mean a conclusion drawn, or to draw a conclusion, or even to suggest (consciously or not) a conclusion, from supporting reasons. There is also a specialized use of the word “implication” in Idealist (Hegelian) philosophy, a school of philosophy with which Van Til interacts frequently. In that context, “implication” is a method of thinking that employs logic with an understanding of the psychological workings of the mind in its situational context. Van Til sometimes speaks of his approach as a “method of implication” in precisely this sense, something more than mere deduction or induction, but including both.21 Incomprehensibility of God: God is incomprehensible not to God himself but to man. We cannot know God exhaustively, but because he knows himself perfectly and has revealed himself to us, we can know him truly. Therefore, we do not know God as he knows himself, but only as he has revealed himself to us. Inductivism / inductive reasoning: In general terms, induction is reasoning that proceeds from the specific to the general. An example might be: if I observe many crows and they are all black, I might conclude that all crows are black. Unlike deduction, inductive reasoning never produces certainty, but only probability. Inductive conclusions could always be refuted by new data; it would be enough to find a white crow. The inductive method plays a central role in the natural sciences. Scientists observe particular phenomena and, on the basis of that data, infer general laws or principles. Many Christians have tried to apply this model to the study of Scripture or natural theology, reasoning that if we accumulate enough evidence, we can arrive at reliable conclusions about God. However, from Van Til’s perspective, inductivism has profound limitations. First, it assumes human autonomy, i.e., that human beings can correctly interpret facts without the need for divine revelation. Second, it presupposes a universe in which nature is uniformly intelligible to the human mind, without the need for a transcendent basis. But as Van Til insists, only the triune God can provide the necessary conditions for inductive reasoning to make any sense at all. Without God, there is no reason to assume that the future will be like the past, or that the world follows regular laws. This does not mean that inductive reasoning is useless. Rather, its value depends on its subordination to biblical revelation. As creatures, we depend on observations to learn, but we must interpret those observations within the framework of the Christian worldview. Induction, like deduction, is a useful tool, but it only finds its true place under the lordship of Christ and in the light of Scripture. See: Deductivism / deductive reasoning. 21 The wording here is from John Frame’s Van Til Glossary. For more, see Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 172-73. 15 Indirect argument: For Van Til, indirect argumentation means arguing for the impossibility of the contrary. We do not argue directly for Christianity. Instead, we argue indirectly by demonstrating that the falsehood of Christianity simply is not possible, or that even the rejection of Christianity is only possible because Christianity is true. Van Til says: “The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed, there is no proof of anything.”22 This method has been variously called “the transcendental argument for the existence of God,” “taking the roof off,” “subversion,” “internal critique,” and “disclosure,” among other things. For Van Til, the goal is what he calls “epistemological self-consciousness” in which the unbeliever is led to acknowledge the poverty and futility of his world and life view. Van Til’s indirect argument is basically a theological argument ad absurdum. Irrationalism: Irrationalism is the belief that human reason is not a trustworthy guide to reality. It is the idea that, ultimately, ourselves, our universe, and human experience are beyond the reach of the human mind and ultimately unintelligible. Van Til believes that unbelievers are both irrationalistic and rationalistic at the same time, always caught in an irresolvable tension between them. The irrationalist, for example, will explain his position and provide reasons for it, up to and including an explanation of the character of reality which makes it inexplicable.23 Limiting concept: In the philosophical use, a limiting concept is a concept of something the existence of which is unverifiable (as well as unfalsifiable), but which can serve a useful purpose in thought, such as Aristotle’s notion of prime matter. Immanuel Kant is considered the modern advocate for limiting concepts, though he did not use the term. In Kant’s philosophy, the noumena, which include things in themselves, God, freedom, and immortality, are limiting concepts in the sense that, although their existence is not accessible to sense perception, our worldview would fall apart without them. Kant believed that we should live “as if” they existed. In fact, we cannot avoid doing so. As Van Til points out, while Kant was the consummate modern rationalist, he saw the need to delimit human reason and to relegate the items beyond its reach to agnosticism. Van Til writes: “The non-Christian notion of the limiting concept is the product of would-be autonomous man who seeks to legislate for all reality, but bows before the irrational as that which he has not yet rationalized.”24 In theology, as Van Til explains, what lies beyond the reach of our reason is not the unknowable but God himself and God’s perfect knowledge of himself and all things. For the unbeliever, mystery is darkness and contradiction. For the Christian, mystery is the bright of truth where God dwells. When something appears contradictory, therefore, we may rest assured that the solution lies in God. Van Til says that “the Christian notion of the limiting concept is the product of the creature who seeks to set forth in systematic form something of the revelation of the Creator.”25 An example would be predestination and human choice. Either one without the other distorts the Christian system, so we maintain them both despite apparent tension between them. Because God is truth, because he dwells in light unapproachable, we may rest assured that there is no true contradiction but only mystery from our limited point of view. 22 Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 381. See Frame, Cornelius Van Til, 231-238. 24 Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 17. 25 Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 17. 23 16 Metaphysics: One of the three traditional branches of Western philosophy (the other two being epistemology and ethics), metaphysics is the study of reality. It is sometimes described as the study of being, or of existence, or of material reality, or of the fundamental realities that exist. One might say that metaphysics studies ‘what there is’. Monism: Monism is the belief that reality is all of one kind, that reality is fundamentally one, single thing. Monism is, therefore, a denial of the Creator-creature distinction which says that reality is fundamentally two: God and creation. Van Til says that when Eve entertains the possibility that the Word of God is false and takes it upon herself to evaluate its trustworthiness, she treats God like a creature and thus makes a “grand monistic assumption.”26 Natural theology: Natural theology is theology (basically, talk about God) conducted without the aid of special revelation—that is, apart from Scripture. Philosophical theology, in which philosophy (logic and argumentation) is used in order to demonstrate the existence of God or to clarify the nature of God is a prominent example. One might think that speculation about God independent of the Christian Scriptures would include all non-Christian theisms and thus all non-Christian religions. In a way, it does, strictly speaking. However, the early stages of Western philosophy were characterized by disillusionment with myth and superstition, so when ancient Greek philosophers, like Socrates, sought to address definitional questions, such as the nature of morality, independently of Greek religion, they set a precedent for a ‘non-religious’ theological speculation, precisely that sort of thing which today goes by the name, “natural theology.” Early Christian theologians and apologists tended to reproduce the same preference for pagan philosophy over pagan religion, finding it easier to sympathize with abstract and impersonal theological concepts than with the sordid pantheon of Greek gods and demigods. “Natural theology,” then, refers to the philosophical production of theological ideas. The 13th century Dominican monk Thomas Aquinas is associated with natural theology and with its influence upon and use by Reformation era and Reformed theologians. Van Til expressed reservations regarding the influence of natural theology in Reformed theology because he believed that any theology not drawn from exegesis of Scripture was of a different kind entirely, and because he believed that the state of sin, as the Reformed have understood it, entailed a corruption of mind such that the unregenerate person was incapable of believing or affirming anything theologically true unless he repent. Epistemological autonomy can only produce false gods; the true God can only be known and affirmed by heeding and repeating after, as it were, God’s own redemptive special revelation. There is, as Van Til affirmed, a true and good natural theology, meaning that it is possible to learn about God from nature, but this true natural theology must be underwritten by special revelation. Van Til was also concerned that natural theology was often conflated with natural revelation. It is important to remember that “revelation” is what God does, and “theology” is what man does with God’s revelation. While in some historical literature the word “theology” is used also to refer to revelation, the point is that true theology begins with the self-attesting speech of God, not with the autonomous speculation of the human being. 26 Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, 2nd ed., ed. William Edgar (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2007), 65. 17 Negation, remotion, via negativa: These three terms are synonymous and refer to a way of knowing God by ascribing to him the opposite of creaturely qualities that are perceived as limits. God is infinite, for example, means that God is not finite, and it is much easier to say what “infinite” does not mean than to say what it actually means. Negation is one of Aquinas’s three means of knowing God, the others being eminence and causality. In Van Til’s view, when this method is used apart from Scripture, apart from God’s speech about himself, it yields a god who is a “pure blank,” a mere negation of finite reality. In practice, when unsupported by positive revelation, negation leads to mysticism (knowing through not knowing) and in some cases to self-negation as a religious discipline, salvation by dissolution of the self. Neutrality: In the context of Christian apologetics, neutrality is the idea of shared territory between Christian and non-Christian, whether experiences or concepts or methods of reasoning in which the differences between believer and unbeliever play no role. Van Til believes that in God’s world which constantly reveals God, there is no neutrality. There are indeed things that all human beings have in common. “Metaphysically,” Van Til says, we have “all things in common.”27 He means that believer and unbeliever alike are made in the image of God and live in a world that constantly declares the glory of God. The context of human life and even our own natures are the same. But because the created world so abundantly reveals God, “common” does not mean neutral. Van Til argues that evidentialist and classical apologetic methods depend upon a measure of purported neutrality between believer and unbeliever (evidence and/or logic and reasoning). That neutrality being specious, those apologetic methods are prevented, in principle, from delivering on their promises to defend true theism or to offer the unbeliever the absolute Christ of the Bible. Noetic effects of sin: Nous is the Greek word for “mind,” so “noetic” describes something related to the mind. The noetic effects of sin on human thought, reasoning, knowledge are direct in a direct manner in Romans 1:18-32, particularly verses 18-23 and 32. The point is that all men, all human beings, without exception, know God, because God has not only made himself knowable but made himself known. But the unregenerate person suppresses his own knowledge of God. He knows God but refuses to acknowledge God. He is in conflict even within himself, resisting the truth about God that surges up from within his heart and mind and bombards himself from all sides. The unbeliever is, therefore, “a much busier man than he appears to be,” scrambling constantly to drown out the self-witness of God with various substitutes (idols, essentially).28 As a result of the darkness of his heart, the unregenerate man becomes a fool. Romans 1 confirms that the classical Calvinist doctrine of sin, total depravity, applies to the life of the mind as much as to any other aspect of the human person or human life. Van Til argues often that direct apologetic argumentation, which implies a weaker doctrine of sin or perhaps a Roman Catholic dualism in which sin resides primarily in the so-called lower faculties, with the result that a more intellectual life may be a more holy life. ‘Be reasonable’ is equivalent to ‘seek holiness’. Romans 1:18-23 is therefore key to understanding the cognitive side of the state of sin and thus the structure of Van Til’s apologetic method. 27 Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 9. K. Scott Oliphint, “Cornelius Van Til and the Reformation of Christian Apologetics,” in Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics, ed. K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2007), 299. 28 18 One and many problem: Knowledge involves uniting particulars into universal categories. If I say, “that is a dog,” I have brought a universal category, dog, together with a particular object, that dog. This is not as simple as it seems. If every particular is exhaustively described by universal categories, then it is no longer particular. In order to be a particularly, it must have some distinguishable characteristics, even perhaps a unique characteristic or two. And yet, if some particularities cannot be described by universal categories, then we do not know what they are. We do not have a name for them, nor even a concept for them, and thus they cannot be known. The same problem can be described in terms of the relation of logic to fact, and of that of subject to object. Van Til says that the triune God of the Bible is the ultimate or original oneand-many. As Herman Bavinck points out, God as one-and-many created the world as a unity-indiversity. Therefore, God himself vindicates predication—“that is a dog”—because behind all of the particularities of experience is God himself and the singular, eternity decree of God in which he ordained whatsoever comes to pass (WCF 3.1).29 Ontology: Ontology is the branch of metaphysics which focuses on the nature of being. One might say that ontology is the study of which things exist, and a thing which exists may be said to have an ontology, which is the same as saying that a thing has being. Van Til insists on the fact that the Christian system, or the Christian world and life view, or Christian theism, begins with Creator-creature ontology, meaning that from the Christian point of view, there is God and creation, and these two exist in a categorically asymmetrical relationship, and everything else flows from that basic point. God is self-existent and creation was brought into being by God and is upheld by God. Creation received its being; God is the eternal I AM, having his being from and in himself. Point of contact: Van Til says that metaphysically, the believer and the unbeliever have everything in common. All are created in the image of God and are surrounded by the things that God has made which continually shed new drops, as Calvin says, of the revelation of God. Romans 1:18-32 includes human consciousness and conscience (both!) in no uncertain terms. Paul says that all men know God because he (God) bears witness constantly to himself both around and within every human being. In terms of the nature of the human being, and the context in which he exists, Van Til says that “God is man’s ultimate environment.”30 In the one true God—in his inescapable presence—all men, regenerate an unregenerate, live and move and have their being (Acts 17:30). However, because of the antithesis (see above), the attitudes of regenerate and unregenerate people toward the same thoroughly theistic environment are different; in fact, they are antithetical. One, the unregenerate, suppresses the knowledge of that God at all costs; the other has received from the Lord the grace of repentance and has been made willing and able to obey his law and to glorify and enjoy him. One sees his autonomy in every fact; the other sees, in every fact, the glory of God. Epistemologically, Van Til concludes, they have nothing in common. The antithesis thus presents, or at least it appears to present, a problem for apologetics. Van Til casts the antithesis in such stark terms that you might wonder whether there can be any meaningful communication at all. Having nothing in common, where can a conversation even 29 30 See Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 238-240, 326-328; Frame, Cornelius Van Til, 63-76. Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 65. 19 begin? Some critics have even claimed that Van Til’s method can only lead to a shouting match. This is the purported problem of the point of contact. At this point, Van Til refers back to metaphysical commonality. The metaphysical reality which all men inhabit includes the knowledge of God. All men know God, abundantly and inescapably; God is known in knowing the things that have been made (Psalm 19; Romans 1). Van Til even takes issue with the suggestion that there could possibly be a problem of a point of contact because to suggest as much is to understate (if not reject) the basically theocentric character of human life and experience. The challenge is not to find a point of contact, but to find something in the whole sphere of human experience that cannot serve that purpose. As we read in Jeremiah 23:24, “‘Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do I not fill heaven and earth?’” And Proverbs 15:3 says that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.” So far are we from a problem of a point of contact that every moment of human consciousness brings us face to face with the one true God; every human feeling, decision, every experience and interaction—all agitate again and again a deep, personal acquaintance with God. In a word, the point of contact is the knowledge of God that all men have by virtue of being image of God. Predication: To predicate is to attach a predicate to a subject; hence, making an assertion. “The sky is blue” is a predication in which “sky” is the subject and “is blue” is the predicate. Blueness, one might say, is predicated of the sky. Predication is, however, not limited to basic observations nor is it a mere linguistic exercise. Rather, to join subject and predicate is to assign meaning and value to the world. Van Til argues that the Christian theism makes predication possible, which is another way of saying that only on the basis of Christianity can there be any knowledge whatsoever, and only on the basis of Christianity can the human being truthfully understand meaning and value. Presupposition: Generally speaking, a presupposition is an implicit belief that precedes and, in some ways, underwrites or supports beliefs of which a person is aware. I want to know what happened, for example, because I believe that truth and justice matter, although I may not have examined my interest in truth and justice. This notion of presuppositions is helpful for understanding Van Til’s apologetics, but there is more to it. For Van Til, the ultimate presupposition is God himself, and all men, Christian or non-Christian, presuppose God. Vern Poythress says that “All scientists—including agnostics and atheists— believe in God. They have to in order to do their work.”31 Poythress means that science is not possible except upon the basis of Christian theism. Therefore, even if the scientist is agnostic or an atheist, in practice he still affirms Christian theism. Even if he claims that science itself challenges the rationality of Christianity, he affirms Christianity by practicing science. Van Til makes the point by claiming that “antitheism presupposes theism.”32 This incoherence in the non-Christian position requires the indirect method of apologetics that Van Til advocates. It is important to note that the idea of God as an ultimate presupposition is not to be understood as a rationalist axiom within a coherent system, as in a coherentist theory of truth. Rather, it is to assert that God is the reality that must exist, and therefore presupposed, in order for thought, experience and knowledge to be possible at all. That is, to presuppose God is to 31 32 Vern S. Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006), 13. Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, xii. 20 assume-consciously or unconsciously-that God must exist for anything to make sense. He is not simply the foundation of Christian thought, but the ontological precondition of all intelligibility. The notion of presuppositions is important for Van Til in at least one additional sense. Van Til’s apologetic method is distinct in that it refuses to abandon Christianity in order to defend it. In Van Til’s view, this is precisely what many apologetic methods do. Direct argument, whether evidentialist or classical, effectively affirms the rationality of the unbelieving point of view in order, supposedly, to offer evidence for the God of Christianity. But the God of Christianity will find no home in the unbelieving worldview. Even if he is welcome, it will be at the price of his full deity; he will be denied the right to speak with the authority that his Word as the Word of God naturally carries. A worldview not based upon the self-existent God of the Bible (see “ontology” above), cannot accommodate true theism; that worldview must be supplanted. Van Til’s view is that an apologetic which cooperates with the unbelieving worldview, whether in terms of empirical evidence or logic, can only a defend a finite god, which is no god at all. Van Til argues, therefore, that the defense of Christianity should be carried out according to Christian principles, according to the Christian view of the world, of the believer, and of the unbeliever. A true defense Christianity presupposes the truth of Christianity and engages the unbeliever accordingly. Finally, it is true that the application of Van Til’s method will involve exposing the unbeliever’s presuppositions, those implicit views behind, as it were, his worldview. But Van Til’s method is not simply about leading a non-Christian to understand himself better. Rather, the idea is to examine those presuppositions in order to identify where a person or a person’s worldview is tangled, distorted, and contradictory, precisely because of hostility to God. Van Til’s method does not seek a rewarding and enlightening new level of self-knowledge for the unbeliever, but a crisis of self-awareness in which a person must come to terms with his spiritual poverty, or with the futility of his ways, with the unsustainability of his worldview. He will realize, perhaps, that his autonomous house is built with stolen goods and that for his theft and his self-assertation God demands an answer. If the Spirit wills, at this point the fact that for those who are in Christ Jesus there is now no condemnation will make sense to him. Principle of continuity: In philosophy, the principle of continuity is the idea that all facts of the universe are connected and form an intelligible whole. Such unity is usually sought through impersonal laws, autonomous reason, or the inherent order of nature. However, in these systems, continuity is postulated without reference to God, leading inevitably to rationalism (all is impersonal unity, Parmenides) or irrationalism (facts lack real connection, Heraclitus). Either one, consistently applied, would make meaning (interpretation) impossible and experience unintelligible. Van Til recognizes that the Christian also upholds a principle of continuity, but of a radically different nature: that of the triune God, autonomous and sovereign, whose eternal plan gives meaning to every created fact. In this framework, there are no “brute” facts or autonomous reality; everything is correctly interpreted only in reference to God and his counsel. Thus, Christianity offers a true and meaningful continuity because it starts from a personal and absolute foundation. He says: “The Christian also has his principle of continuity. It is that of the selfcontained God and his plan for history. His principle of continuity is therefore the opposite of that of rationalism without being that of irrationalism.”33 33 Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 153. 21 Van Til shows that non-Christian systems oscillate between false principles of continuity: either an impersonal and rigid unity (as in Greek rationalism), or a meaningless fragmentation (as in modern empiricism). Only Christianity, by affirming the sovereignty of God and the Creator-creature distinction, can sustain true continuity without compromising the real diversity of the created world. See also Principle of discontinuity. Principle of discontinuity: In philosophical systems, discontinuity usually means that reality lacks an understandable unifying order. In irrationalism, such as that of Heraclitus or certain modern existentialisms, everything is in constant change, without stability or ultimate structure; there is no system that makes facts intelligible, and therefore human reason becomes useless. But rationalism, for its part, also falls into a form of discontinuity by excluding God as the ultimate source of connection between facts. The rationalist constructs a closed logical system that pretends to account for everything by itself, but in that pretension, he breaks with the dependence of human thought on the divine, thus disconnecting knowledge from its true foundation. In both cases, the true principle of unity is lost: one by affirming it without God, the other by denying it completely. Discontinuity, then, is equivalent to epistemological and ontological chaos, where neither reason nor revelation can be sustained. Van Til, on the other hand, defends a Christian principle of discontinuity, which affirms the qualitative, ontological and absolute difference between the Creator and the creature. God is self-existent, immutable, and sufficient in himself; man, on the contrary, is derived, dependent, and limited. This discontinuity does not eliminate all possibility of knowledge but frames it within a relationship of analogy: man can truly know God because he was created in His image, but he never shares God’s being, nor can he know Him exhaustively. He writes: The true Christian apologist has his principle ofr discontinuity; it is expressed in his appeal to the mind of God as all-comprehensive in knowledge because all-controlling in power. He holds his principle of discontintuity, then, not at the expense of all logical relationship between facts, but because of the recognition of his creaturehood. His principle of discontintuity is therefore the opposite of that of irrationalism, without being that of rationalism.34 This Christian principle avoids both irrationalism and rationalism: it does not postulate a chaotic universe, but neither does it reduce God to an impersonal principle within a closed system. Christian discontinuity preserves God’s sovereignty and transcendence, and at the same time, gives rise to true continuity within the framework of divine counsel. See Principle of continuity. Probability: Probably is the likelihood of something being the case or of something happening. Technically speaking, probability is a ratio comparing the strength of the evidence for to the strength of the evidence against the truth of a hypothesis or a claim. In the context of apologetics or philosophy (epistemology in particular), probability is the degree to which a proposition approaches certainty. Van Til believed that the certainty of Christianity was key for apologetics. The Christian worldview is based upon the self-existence of the triune God, not upon the human being or his view of the world. Van Til critiqued apologetic methods which treated Christianity as only a hypothesis or probable claim. To claim that Christianity is probable, even highly 34 Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 153. 22 probable, is to deny the clarity of God’s revelation and to adopt the unbeliever’s principles of reason and interpretation in which the human being and his judgement are certain, while God is at best a possibility. John Frame argues that this autonomy is in fact an attempt to “be like God,” epistemologically speaking. The unbeliever’s epistemology makes a specious claim to selfexistence.35 Rationalism: Generally speaking, rationalism is the belief that human reason, as opposed to sense experience or other faculties, is the most reliable guide to truth. Reason, so they say, is the arbiter of truth and falsehood. Van Til believes that all unbelievers are rationalistic because their worldview rejects even the possibility of the authoritative, self-attesting revelation of the selfexistent God. Unless God is allowed to speak with the authority that is rightfully his, the unbeliever will always be a rationalist because he has no other option. Van Til also argues, however, that the unbeliever must also be in some ways or at some times or on certain points an irrationalist. He will need at times to surrender to the unknown or the unknowable, because he is finite. See “irrationalism” above. Receptively reconstructive: The Christian cannot be neutral in his interpretation of the world. He must self-consciously interpret the world according to God’s word and with reference to God. And what does it mean to interpret the world with reference to God? It means to presuppose him. The Christian should presuppose God because God is in fact the presupposition, the precondition, of all things, and thinking should reflect reality if it is to be truthful thinking. God, his decree of all things, creation, and providence together constitute Christian theism, or what Van Til sometimes calls “the creation idea,” within which the regenerate image-bearer interprets the world.36 When the human being thinks rightly, he thinks analogically. That is, God’s interpretation of the world is the original and authoritative interpretation. In fact, God’s interpretation of the world comes before the world itself. The world, in that sense, is God’s interpretation of his own thoughts. Human interpretation is neither original nor creative, but rather receptive and reconstructive. We think God’s thoughts after him. “Receptively reconstructive” is shorthand for Van Til’s Christian epistemology. Reductio ad absurdum: A form of argument in which, rather than directly prove a conclusion, the arguer reduces the contrary claim to an absurdity. You claim that P, but P implies (or leads to) not P. Therefore, your position is incoherent and relinquishes any claim on me. Or, you claim that P, but P implies (or leads to) Q, which no one in their right mind would affirm. The result is the same. The reductio argument is also called an “indirect argument” or an “argument from the impossibility of the contrary,” or sometimes an “internal critique.” Something like this is considered the first step in a Van Tillian apologetic, and various terms have emerged which attempt to capture the main idea, such as “taking the roof off” (Francis Schaeffer and William Edgar) and “subversion” (Daniel Strange). Van Til talked about leading the unbeliever to “epistemological self-consciousness.” Rather than the formal incoherence of affirming P and not P, Van Til believed that the goal of a Christian, apologetic reductio should be to lead the 35 See John M. Frame, “Divine Aseity and Apologetics,” in Revelation and Reason, 115-130. The “creation idea” is “the creation of the world by an absolutely self-sufficient God.” Cornelius Van Til and Louis Berkhof, Foundations of Christian Education: Addresses to Christian Teachers (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1989), 84. 36 23 unbeliever to recognize the futility of his ways, to realize that his interpretation of the world was indeed incoherent but more importantly that he was at enmity with God and suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Self-attestation, self-authentication: In any system of thought, the ultimate authority justifies itself. (See circular argument above.) Van Til argued, of course, that that ultimate authority in our thinking ought to be God, because God, as self-sufficient, is self-attesting. There is no higher court to which we can appeal when God speaks in order to verify or validate his speech as trustworthy or true. He is truth itself, and his word bears the authority of his own unique and selfsufficient being. Self-attestation is the unique character of the authority of Scripture, therefore, for which Scripture is the singular, external principle of creaturely knowledge. Van Til says that “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.”37 Van Til does not mean that Scripture and reason do not mix, or that when we read Scripture, we should suspend reason. The issue is authority. We use reason when we read and interpret Scripture, but reason is receptive of Scripture as the word of God; reason does not sit in judgment over the word of God. One must be clear, in other words, as to which is self-attesting: the mind of man or the Word of God. Obviously, for Van Til, the Word of God is self-attesting. Thus, the right use of reason is in receptive reconstruction of reality in light of Scripture. Sense of deity, divinity (also, sensus deitatis, divinitatis, semen religionis): This phrase comes from John Calvin, who says the following: That there exists in the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.38 This is Calvin’s way of describing the knowledge of God that all men have by virtue of being the image of God, which Paul teaches in Romans 1. Calvin here highlights the internal or subjective component of general revelation and its effect in the postfall world on the unregenerate sinner, which is to bear inescapable witness to God and thus to the sinner’s guilt before Him. Paul says that as a result the unbeliever is “without excuse,” or “without apology.” This knowledge of God, says Calvin, prevents “any man from pretending ignorance.” Van Til draws many implications for apologetics, one of which is the fact that despite the antithesis (epistemologically believer and unbeliever have nothing in common), there are many points of contact because, by what we may call “common grace,” God maintains knowledge of himself—revelation of himself—within the mind and heart of the unbeliever. The purported problem of the point of contact is precluded by the knowledge of God that all men have. 37 Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 130. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2002), 1.3.1. 38 24 Starting point: When explaining his epistemology, Van Til distinguishes proximate and ultimate starting points. The proximate starting point is where “the knowledge of facts must begin,” that is, with the human mind.39 The human thinking is the proximate starting point of his own knowledge. For the believer, who thinks God’s thoughts after him, the ultimate starting point is God, while for the unbeliever, the proximate starting point is also the ultimate starting point. The believer, ideally speaking, interprets all things with reference to God while the unbeliever, according to his own principle of autonomy, interprets—or attempts to interpret—all things with reference to himself as ultimate point of reference, or ultimate starting point. It is no surprise, then, that the unbeliever does not conclude that Christianity it true, because he cannot. Van Til insists upon the fact that a starting point, method, and conclusion are always involved with one another. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re: This Latin phrase means “gentle in manner, strong in substance.” Van Til was reportedly fond of this phrase, believing that it captured well the correct approach to the defense of the faith. That and What: Van Til criticizes apologetic methods which attempted to prove that God exists without considering what he is. Van Til claimed that the that and the what are inseparable. Not only are we not interested in the fact that some god or other exists, but we believe that the only true theism is Christian theism. This is akin to Van Til’s claim that Christian theism is a unit—it is all inter-connected—and that therefore it should be defended as a unit. He does not mean that all of Christianity must be explicit all the time. He only means that our defense of the faith should distance itself from non-specific ideas, such as an unknown god or moral values detached from Christ. Transcendental argument: A transcendental argument seeks to show the necessary conditions for the possibility of rational thought or meaningful discourse. The terminology is associated with Immanuel Kant who argued for his belief that the mind comprises categories which facilitate the interpretation of sense data by demonstrating that such interpretation is necessary for scientific knowledge. In other words, he argued that, given scientific knowledge, which no one would deny, his claim could not be false. Van Til defended the use of the same strategy for the defense of Christianity. He believed that this indirect argumentation was the only kind appropriate to a Christian apologetic, since the biblical God is the author of all meaning and rationality. Unit, whole (defending christianity as a): Van Til believed strongly in defending the particular elements of Christianity with an awareness of the connection of each element with the overall system of truth. An obvious example is the existence of God. The Christian should keep in mind that the God he speaks of and the God he defends is the triune God of the Bible, not a generic god. Univocal, univocism: Language about God could be equivocal, univocal, or analogous, based upon how we understand the actual metaphysical relationship between God and ourselves, or between God and creation. Van Til taught explained univocism by referring to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who claimed that “all is one.” The idea is that while we observe 39 Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 120. 25 difference and plurality, such as change through time or things one distinct from another, at the end of the day all things are identical. There are not many things but only one. As a result, predication—a description of reality—becomes meaningless. We might distinguish “this dog” from “that dog,” but the distinction is illusory; it is not truthful, because at the end of the day, both dogs are one. Likewise, we might distinguish “this cat” from “that cat,” but at the end of the day, “this” and “that” are the same—not only the same cat but also the same dog, and so on. This is the problem of univocism. In theology, univocism describes a situation in which the distinction between the Creator and the creature disappears as the use of language assumes a perfect identity between the familiar meaning of a word and its application to God. Van Til says that there is an analogy between the Creator and the creature so that we can know God truly but never exhaustively. See analogy and equivocal, equivocism above. Worldview (also, world-and-life view): Van Til picks up this terminology from Abraham Kuyper, although Immanuel Kant is credited with the first use of the German term, Weltanschauung, usually translated “worldview.” A world and life view is a comprehensive view of all things, underwritten by basic beliefs about the nature and meaning of existence and human life and so on. It is a way of understanding reality that governs all thought and life. Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism, a series of lectures delivered at Princeton Seminary in 1898, were intended to demonstrate the world and life view of Calvinism. Van Til’s definition of apologetics employs this term: “Apologetics is the vindication of the Christian world and life view against all forms of the non-Christian world and life view.”40 40 Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 17. See J. H. Bavinck, Personality and Worldview, trans. James Eglinton (Wheaton: Crossway, 2023) on the term “worldvision” and a slightly different take on the term “worldview.” 26