Cornelius Van Til
Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987),
Reformed theologian and apologist, was born in Grootegast, Holland. At the age
of ten, he moved with his family to Highland, Indiana. The Van Tils affiliated
with the Christian Reformed Church, and Cornelius attended denominational
schools, the Calvin Preparatory School, Calvin College and (for one year)
Calvin Theological Seminary, all in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He transferred to
Princeton Theological Seminary and earned his Th. M. there in 1925, followed by
his marriage to Rena Klooster. He completed his Ph. D. at Princeton University
in 1927. His dissertation, supervised by Archibald Allan Bowman, compared
Reformed theology’s view of God with the absolute of philosophical Idealism.
Van Til pastored a Christian
Reformed church in Spring Lake, Michigan, taking a leave of absence to teach
apologetics at Princeton Seminary during the academic year 1928-29. The
seminary offered him the chair of apologetics at the end of that period, but he
returned to Spring Lake. He loved the pastorate and did not want to cooperate
in the reorganization of the seminary mandated that spring by the General
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A. He believed that reorganization
would purge the seminary’s historic stand for orthodox Calvinism and make it
more representative of liberal theological viewpoints in the church. Those
viewpoints included that of the Auburn Affirmation of 1924, in which 1,300
ministers declared that such doctrines as biblical infallibility, the virgin
birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, his bodily resurrection and his
literal second coming were human “theories,” not to be required of ministerial
candidates.
Others opposing the reorganization
included J. Gresham Machen, author of Christianity and Liberalism, who
left Princeton Seminary with others in 1929 to found Westminster Theological
Seminary of Philadelphia, a school devoted to Presbyterian doctrine, but
independent of denominational control. Van Til also joined the new school. He
taught apologetics and systematic theology there until his retirement in 1972
and continued to teach occasionally until 1979.
In 1936, Machen was suspended from
the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., for founding and supporting
a non-denominational, theologically orthodox mission agency. He then founded,
with others, a new denomination, originally called the Presbyterian Church of
America, later the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In sympathy with Machen, Van
Til transferred his ministerial membership from the Christian Reformed Church
to the new denomination, where he remained the rest of his life.
Major influences on Van Til’s
thought were the Dutch Reformed theologians, particularly Abraham Kuyper who
emphasized that Christ is Lord of all areas of human life. Kuyper disparaged
apologetics because he thought it tended to put human reason above Scripture.
Van Til’s teachers are Princeton, however, emphasized that Christianity has
nothing to fear from rational scrutiny and is fully capable of rational
defense. Van Til sought to do justice to both these insights, by developing an
approach to apologetics that was rational, but based on a distinctively
biblical concept of rationality.
Van Til’s studies of Idealism
convinced him that all human thought is governed by presuppositions.
(Hence, Van Til is sometimes called a “presuppositionalist,” though he was not
enthusiastic about that label.) Ultimate presuppositions, he believed, cannot
be proved by usual methods, since they serve as the basis of all proof. But
they can be proved “transcendentally,” by showing that they are necessary for
all rational thought and must be true if there is to be any meaning or order in
the world. Van Til sought to reconstruct Christian apologetics so that it would
establish the Christian God as the presupposition of thought, rather than one
rational conclusion among many.
He disparaged the “traditional
method” of establishing Christianity by theistic proofs and historical
evidences, because he believed that tradition began with data considered
intelligible apart from God and thereby tried to prove God’s existence. On the
contrary, he argued, if we concede that anything is intelligible apart from the
God of Scripture, we have lost the battle at the outset. So we should, rather,
use a transcendental method, showing that the various forms of non-Christian
thought (“would-be autonomous reasoning,” as he put it) reduce to
meaninglessness, that they can account for precisely nothing, and that the
Christian world and life view can make sense of everything. For Van Til, then,
the creator-creature distinction is the key to metaphysics, epistemology, and
ethics.
Some critics said that Van Til left
no room for the use of evidence in apologetics. He replied that evidence is
useful when used within a transcendental argument based on biblical
presuppositions. But is this not circular, to prove Christianity on the basis
of Christian presuppositions? Yes, said Van Til, in a sense. But (1) every
system of thought is circular when arguing its most fundamental presuppositions
(e.g. a rationalist can defend the authority of reason only by using
reason). (2) The Christian circle is the only one that renders reality
intelligible on its own terms.
Non-Christian thought, he argues,
collapses into meaninglessness, because of the noetic effects of sin. The
unbeliever knows God (Rom. 1:18-21) but suppresses the truth (1:18, 21-32).
Therefore, there is an “antithesis” between Christian and unbelieving thought,
between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world. Although the unbeliever
knows and states truth on occasion, he does that only by inconsistency with his
presuppositions and by relying inconsistently on the Christian worldview, or,
as Van Til put it, by “borrowed capital.”
Van Til’s publications exceeded
300, including nearly forty books. Some of the most important are listed below.
Most of Van Til’s writings, plus many audio lectures and sermons, can be found
on the CD-ROM, The Works of Cornelius Van Til (published by Labels Army
Co., available from P&R Publishers). On that CD, and also available
separately, is the most complete bibliography of Van Til’s works, A Guide to
the Writings of Cornelius Van Til, 1895-1987, by Eric D. Bristley.
Bibliography
G. L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and
Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ,
J. M. Frame, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1995)
J. G. Machen, Christianity and Liberalism ( Grand Rapids, MI, 1923)
C. Van Til, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ., 1975)
--, The Defense of Christianity and My Credo (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1971)
--, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ, 1955, revised and abridged, 1963)