The Message of Cornelius Van Til
by John M. Frame
(Presented at Cornelius Van Til’s memorial service, May, 1987.)
Beneath all of Cornelius
Van Til's technical terminology and
philosophical depth was a warm faith in Jesus Christ. He loved to quote
the first question and answer of the Heidelberg
Catechism: What is your only comfort in life and in death?
That I, with body
and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my
faithful savior Jesus Christ, who with his precious blood has fully
satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the
devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven
not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must work together
for my salvation. Wherefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures
me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and
ready henceforth to live unto him.
At the most
fundamental level, that was the message of Dr. Van Til.
He saw his work in apologetics and theology as a form of preaching,
preaching that wonderful, warm, comforting gospel. Reflecting on his
childhood experience, he wrote,
Every minister in those days had a V.D.M. degree: Verbum Dei Minister.
[That is, minister of the word of God-- J.F.] When, therefore, I became a
teacher of apologetics it was natural for me to think, not only of my Th.
M. and my Ph. D., but above all of my V. D. M.
The former degrees were but means whereby I might be true to the latter
degree.
[1]
So in presenting his ideas, especially in popular settings,
Dr. Van Til often reverted to something more
like preaching than like teaching. Not that he was at all hesitant to
bring philosophical issues before his audiences. He spoke readily of
Aristotle and Aquinas, of Kant and Hegel, of Barth and Brunner; but often in the
same lecture of Adam and Eve, of Noah, Abraham and David, and of his
faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
Any account of Van Til's technical concepts, his system of apologetics, must take seriously his claim to be
a gospel preacher. This fact is not only of biographical
interest, but has a conceptual importance as well. "The
self-attesting Christ of Scripture," he wrote, "has always been
my starting point for everything I have said."
[2]
His favorite
professor at Princeton Seminary was not the apologist William Brenton Greene, but the biblical
theologian Geerhardus Vos,
and not only because Vos was Dutch. Van Til admired the depth of Vos's
Christ-centered approach to Scripture and emulated that approach often in
his preaching and occasionally even in his apologetic writings. His goal
was to develop an apologetic system which would not make nonsense of the
biblical Christ, but would rather display his glory just as Scripture
presents him.
Scripture presents Christ as
"self-attesting." That is to say, he is Lord. All authority in heaven and on earth is his. He will not
submit to man's standards, to sinful man's pathetic ideas of what he must
be. He speaks for himself.
And he speaks with a voice that is
unmistakable, in Scripture, in the world, and in man himself. He is the
cosmic Lord in whom all things consist; therefore nothing in
all creation can be rightly understood apart from him. His mark is on everything
he has made, including ourselves, his creatures, made in his image.
"Logic," "fact" and "value" are what he says
they are. They do not validate Christ until he first validates
them. The truth of his word is not merely "possible" or
"probable," as compromising apologists would maintain; rather,
it is more sure than any other certainty. There is no excuse for
unbelief; indeed, everyone knows God, however much one may try to
suppress that knowledge.
This is not a message that
unbelievers like to hear. They would rather believe that they can judge
Christ by their own standards. But Christ himself says that they cannot.
Moreover, he says that they are dead in trespasses and sins and cannot
even see the kingdom of heaven unless they are born again. Van Til shows how pathetic the unbeliever is as he tries,
comically, to be the judge of all things. On the one hand, he claims
an ultimate, absolute knowledge, for only by such knowledge can
he show that Christianity cannot be true. On the other hand, when this arrogant claim fails, as it always
must, then the unbeliever reverts to the opposite view, that there is no
certain knowledge, no absolute truth. But in saying that he reduces
his own argument to nonsense.
How do we communicate the gospel to
such foolish people? By telling them what they least want to hear, that
Christ is Lord, not themselves. By showing them what they least want
to see, that their own pretentious efforts at intellectual self-justification
are hopeless and ridiculous. Apologetics, you see, is serious business, a matter of life and
death. Cruel indeed is the physician who tells his cancer patient that he
can get by on aspirin. The apologist must break the bad news to
those with terminal cases of sin.
But the bad news is only the first
installment of the gospel, the good news. Jesus died for sinners and rose
victorious from the grave. His spirit raises the spiritually dead,
in Christ, to newness of life. And that newness of life has epistemological
implications too: for in Jesus is found all the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.
Such was Van Til's gospel preaching: a system of apologetics, indeed a philosophy of being, knowledge and value, which had as its goal nothing more or less than to honor Van Til's faithful savior, the self-attesting Christ of Scripture. Thus as we remember the apologist, we are inevitably driven to worship his Lord.