In pp. 77–79 of The Defense of the Faith (first edition), Cornelius Van Til addresses the fundamental differences between Christian and non-Christian perspectives on ethics, particularly focusing on the role of the will of God as foundational to ethical systems. Van Til begins by asserting that God’s will is absolute and self-determinative. God is eternally good, not becoming good through a process, but being so by his very nature. Unlike humans, God does not have to achieve goodness; it is intrinsic to his eternal character. Therefore, God is both absolutely necessary and absolutely free.

Van Til introduces a key distinction between Christian and non-Christian viewpoints. Christians uphold the concept of an absolutely self-determinative God, who is the necessary presupposition for all human activity. Non-Christian ethics, however, assume that if the Christian God were real, he would stifle ethical activity. This is because non-theistic views perceive God and man as having wills conditioned by an environment, implying that God must also achieve goodness through a process.

Van Til critiques Platonic philosophy, noting that Plato’s conception of “the Good” was ultimate, but his god was not. For Plato, “the Good” was abstract and separated from a fully personal God, leaving the ultimate reality as dependent on the element of Chance. Thus, even if Plato spoke of the Good, it was not self-determined or sovereign in the Christian sense. Modern idealist philosophers tried to build on Platonic thought by proposing an “absolutely self-determinative Experience,” but ultimately failed, according to Van Til, because they made God dependent on the space-time universe, blending time and eternity. As a result, God became dependent on external processes rather than being sovereign over them.

The core ethical difference between Christianity and non-Christian systems is the acceptance or rejection of an ultimately self-determinative God. Van Til argues that without the presupposition of God as absolute, there can be no coherent or purposeful human experience, including ethics. The absolute sovereignty of God is not a hindrance to human responsibility but rather its foundation.

Van Til makes a point to distinguish Christian doctrine from philosophical determinism. While both affirm necessity, philosophical determinism is impersonal, suggesting that everything is determined by blind, impersonal forces. Christianity, in contrast, asserts that the ultimate reality is personal; God’s sovereign will underlies the possibility of genuine human freedom and responsibility.

Watch on YouTube and Vimeo.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:05:31 Ethics and the Christian Philosophy of Reality
• 00:11:45 The Christian Conception of God
• 00:18:02 The Absolute Contrast between Christian and Non-Christian Ethics
• 00:29:48 Contrasts with Platonism
• 00:47:18 Contrast with Idealism
• 00:52:10 The Central Ethical Distinction
• 00:55:22 Contrast with Philosophical Determinism
• 01:05:11 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Rev. Dr. Daniel Ragusa, pastor of Messiah’s Reformed Fellowship in New York City joins Camden Bucey for this thoughtful episode of Christ the Center. Together, they explore the profound impact of Dutch Reformed theology on American Presbyterianism, focusing on key historical moments and figures, including Cornelius Van Til and Gerhardus Vos. Ragusa shares insights from his recent work translating and editing Van Til’s “Dutch Letters” and discusses the lasting influence of Dutch Reformed thought on the formation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC).

This conversation examines the connections between the nineteenth-century Dutch secession movements, particularly the Afscheiding of 1834, and their influence on the theological and ecclesiastical landscape in America. With a focus on confessional integrity and the challenges posed by modernity, Ragusa highlights the ongoing relevance of these historical developments for Reformed theology today.

Listeners will also hear about exciting new publications from Reformed Forum, including Ragusa’s forthcoming book, The Joyful Fellowship, which traces the theme of “God with us” throughout Scripture. This episode provides a rich, historical, and theological exploration of the Dutch Reformed legacy in American Presbyterianism.

Watch on YouTube or Vimeo.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:04:16 The Joyful Fellowship
• 00:13:08 Van Til’s Dutch Letters
• 00:21:43 First Impressions of the Letters
• 00:29:09 The Afscheiding of 1834
• 00:47:42 The Doleantie
• 00:50:10 Holland-Mania
• 00:54:51 Vos as a Connecting Figure
• 01:06:30 American Presbyterian Influence on the Dutch Reformed
• 01:11:57 A Struggle for Faithfulness to Confessional Identity
• 01:21:12 Teaching at MARS
• 01:23:24 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Dan Ragusa

In this installment of Van Til Group, we turn to pp. 73–77 of Cornelius Van Til’s classic book, The Defense of the Faith. In this section, Van Til critiques both Roman Catholicism and certain strands of Evangelicalism for their approach to human autonomy and the nature of sin.

Van Til argues that Roman Catholicism, as represented by Thomas Aquinas, assigns too much autonomy to human consciousness, even before the Fall, which undermines the Scriptural notion of authority and total depravity. He contends that Aquinas views fallen man as not entirely different from Adam in paradise, thus diminishing the need for grace.

Similarly, Van Til criticizes C.S. Lewis, representing a segment of Evangelical thought, for conflating metaphysical and ethical issues and for not adequately emphasizing human disobedience to God as the root of ethical problems. Both perspectives, according to Van Til, fail to uphold the biblical doctrine that only through faith and complete reliance on the triune God of Scripture can true ethical behavior be achieved.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:04:48 Support Reformed Forum
• 00:10:35 A Christian Philosophy of Behavior
• 00:18:48 Roman Catholicism as Halfway between Christianity and Paganism
• 00:28:38 The Relationship between Natural and Special Revelation
• 00:41:36 The Natural vs the Supernatural End of Created Man in Thomistic Theology
• 01:02:45 Evangelicalism and C. S. Lewis’s Views
• 01:13:11 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

In this episode, we welcome Scott J. Hatch, author of Reformed Forum’s latest publication, Van Til and the Foundation of Christian Ethics: A God-Centered Approach to Moral Philosophy, to consider the profound relationship between theology and ethics as articulated by Cornelius Van Til. In addition to providing an original treatment of the subject, Hatch has also edited a critical edition of Van Til’s Christian-Theistic Ethics, which is included as a lengthy appendix in this volume. This never before been available, and anyone interested in the thought of Cornelius Van Til should surely get a copy for their library.

This insightful conversation illuminates Van Til’s unique approach to Christian ethics, emphasizing a God-centered moral philosophy grounded in the doctrine of the self-contained ontological Trinity. Hatch explores Van Til’s critique of moral relativism and how his theological framework offers a compelling solution to ethical dilemmas, contrasting with the perspectives of other ethicists and theologians.

The episode promises to enrich understanding of Christian ethics through the lens of Reformed theology, challenging believers to consider the foundational role of the Triune God in all moral considerations. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of how Cornelius Van Til’s groundbreaking work continues to shape contemporary discussions on Christian ethics, offering a robust, God-centered approach that speaks to the challenges of modern moral relativism.

Chapters

• 00:00:07 Introduction
• 00:04:12 Being Introduced to Cornelius Van Til’s Theology and Apologetics
• 00:09:54 Versions of Van Til’s Ethics
• 00:21:24 The Uniqueness of Van Til’s Ethical Approach
• 00:28:42 Ethics and the Doctrine of God
• 00:36:44 Alasdair MacIntryre and Critiques of Moral Relativism
• 00:45:11 Critiques and Misunderstandings of Van Til’s Ethics
• 00:53:29 Van Til’s Value for Future Generations
• 00:59:13 For Further Study
• 01:03:54 Conclusion

Links

• Purchase Van Til and the Foundation of Christian Ethics
• Purchase from Reformation Heritage Books for international shipping options

Participants: Camden Bucey, Scott Hatch

Carlton Wynne, Lane Tipton, and Camden Bucey turn to pp. 54–58 of Cornelius Van Til’s The Defense of the Faith to discuss the Christian theory of knowledge. In this section, Van Til speaks of God’s knowledge of the world and then man’s knowledge of God.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:28 God’s Knowledge of the World
• 07:41 The Plan of God to Create the World
• 13:13 The Pantheistic Switch
• 24:31 God’s Free Knowledge Does Not Imply an Eternal Creation
• 35:32 Refusing to Concede to Rationalism
• 43:10 Man’s Knowledge of God
• 49:46 Devotional Thoughts on the Creator-Creature Distinction
• 56:45 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

This the second installment of a quarterly series of interviews highlighting the Lord’s work in the lives and ministries of our Reformed Forum faculty. Lane Tipton, Fellow of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Reformed Forum and pastor of Trinity OPC in Easton, Pennsylvania, sits down with Ryan Noha to discuss his conversion through a Leviticus 16 sermon on TV, his zeal for Christian education and global missions, and his joyful service of the Lord in his family, church, and the work of Reformed Forum as the George Bailey of Glenside.

Lane, I’m familiar with your background and how you came to know the Lord, but it’s always a joy to hear of the old, old story of the gospel and how the Lord brings the finished work of Christ to bear effectually upon his people. Would you tell us how you were converted and then eventually became a minister in the OPC?

I grew up in a Southern Baptist home. My mother was a devout and godly woman. Her parents were both wonderful Christians. My father was not a believer, but my mother would have us attend worship with her every Sunday morning. From the earliest time I can remember, I was sitting under the gospel, but I did not accept and embrace it. After I hit about age 13, my mom did not require me to go to church but gave me the opportunity to either go or not go, and I decided I wouldn’t go. I went through my junior high and high school years without really going to church at all, without attending any worship services at all. I played a year of football on a scholarship out of Tascosa at Eastern New Mexico State University. I was thinking about pursuing a law degree and thought when I came home that summer that it would be a really wise thing to read my Bible and get a little bit of familiarity with the Judeo-Christian ethic, given the fact that I was wanting to pursue law.

I turned to Jesus’ denunciation of the Pharisees almost instantly where he was denouncing them in Matthew 23 and following for being whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside, but inside full of dead men’s bones. I recognized that he was speaking in his word to me, and that I was in danger of the judgment. A few days later on a Sunday morning, I turned on the television, and a man was preaching on Leviticus 16 and the Day of Atonement. He then talked about the blood of a sacrificial offering, a sin offering, being brought into the most holy place and satisfying the wrath of God. He talked about a scapegoat, having the sins of Israel confessed over its head and being driven outside the camp, bearing away the guilt of God’s people. He said these were types of Jesus. And I instantly recognized that my release from my sin, and my fear, and my guilt, and my burden was found in the wrath-propitiating, blood sacrifice of Jesus who bore away my sin. I saw instantly in that typology that Jesus was like the scapegoat, who had taken my sin away from me as far as the east is from the west. He had shed his blood for my sin and satisfied God’s wrath. And I repented of my sin; I asked the Lord to forgive me. I was elated. I thought, goodness, how could I have not seen this all of these years? I instantly told my mom who just came into the room and was weeping tears of joy. She had been praying for this for 19 years. And the Paul Harvey aspect of the story is that of all people to preach that sermon, it happened to be Jimmy Swaggart, believe that or not.

So I was converted and within a few months had found my way toward the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I had received through some men, who were in Amarillo at the time, interested in Reformed theology, some literature that led me toward the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. As I read systematic theologies—Louis Berkhof, some B. B. Warfield, a little bit of Van Til—I was very quickly led by conviction to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I came to appreciate immensely Machen’s commitment to the spirituality of the church, his critique of liberalism as a different religion, the militancy of the OPC, its self-conscious embrace of being a pilgrim people, maintaining faithfulness to the gospel, not seeking cultural influence or affluence, but seeking rather to worship the Lord as engaged pilgrims, taking every thought captive, making it obedient to Christ, seeking the things above by faith, entering Sabbath rest, and being concerned most of all for the worship of the Triune God and giving a consistent, faithful witness to the world and calling all men and women, boys and girls everywhere to repent. That sent me on a path toward going to seminary.

It was a strangely quick movement from my conversion to pursuing the OPC and coming to a profound appreciation of Machen and his militancy and humility, and the church as it has been called by Charlie Dennison, “the church of the brokenhearted,” the church that mourns. This is not the norm, this kind of policy and worship and doctrine and this heavenly-mindedness. I have been in the OPC years and years now. I joined the Abilene congregation in 1989, if my memory serves, so it’s been a while.

I rejoice to hear of the Lord’s grace in your life afresh, not only that he was pleased to raise you from the deadness of your sin, but to grant you such rapid growth and maturity, even that you would see Christ in all of Scripture from day one and then dive right away into the deep end of Reformed theology with Machen and all the greats. This is truly a wonderful grace and profound mercy. I’d love to hear about the Lord’s gracious work in your family, as well. Would you introduce us to the Tiptons and share with us how the Lord is leading you all through this current season of life?

I met my wife, Charlene, when I came back from Southwestern Oklahoma State University. She has five uncles who have been or still are Orthodox Presbyterian ministers. We met in Abilene, Texas in 1992. About 10 months later, we were married. Everyone was saying, you guys need to get married. And I was all excited about us—you didn’t have to encourage me! She’s a beautiful, godly, intelligent, wonderful woman. Soon after that, we went to seminary, Westminster California. And by the time 1998 came around, we had our first child, Lauren; a few years later, Lyle; a few years after that, Trevor; a few years after that, Katie or Kaitlyn. And so we have four children. The oldest, Lauren, is now married. Lyle and Trevor are at Geneva playing basketball. And I will admit, tearing it up, and I’m very thankful for that. They’re godly young men walking with the Lord. Katie is class president just flourishing at Phil-Mont school founded by Cornelius Van Til. It’s all worked out in an amazing way.  Char and I are coming up on our 30th anniversary this next year. She works in the OPC home offices. She has been working there for several years now and does a fantastic job.

We’ve been here in Glenside since 1998, and it’s wonderful. I’m serving at Trinity OPC in Easton. It’s about 50 minutes from here. The family is doing great. They are a delight to my heart. They love the Lord and are all flourishing. I am so thankful. I’ve joked around before; I’ll adapt it, transpose it into this: I’m the George Bailey of Glenside, brother. I am just so thankful, so happy, and so richly blessed to have this family. They are, outside of the Lord, just the truest and purest joy of my heart.

Now as long as you mentioned Phil-Mont Academy and Van Til, I’ve got to ask, did you and Char have a devotional yet over that 1961 Van Til editorial I shared with you? The one that was published by Willow Grove Christian Day School, “The Whole Armour of God”?

Not yet. But talk about a letter that just states all that my wife has said before! Char has said before a number of times that she loves obviously loves Van Til. She and I married in part around a passionate commitment to Christian education. When I was in seminary out in California, Char taught at a Christian school. She taught years before that in Reformed Christian schools. She is just a fantastic teacher. We homeschooled our children. But when we first met, she and I read Van Til’s Essays on Christian Education as devotional literature and would marvel at the wonderful, robust, Reformed Trinitarianism, and Covenant Theology, and antithesis, and understanding of common grace, and the proper and indispensable role of Christian education from a Reformed world-and-life view. We fell in love around that. And so when we came to the Philadelphia area, and Phil-Mont was within ten minutes of our house, founded by Van Til—it’s just wonderful. So we’ll get around to that essay. I’m sure we’ll have numbers of discussions about it. Char has said, and I agree in certain ways with this, that Van Til might be at his very best when he’s talking about Christian education. You know, there’s a lot of “best” about Van Til, but one of his brightest points is talking about a consistently Reformed theological education for covenant children.

I couldn’t agree more. Now, you mentioned that you’re currently serving as pastor of Trinity OPC in Easton, Pennsylvania. What is your beloved congregation like and how is the Lord using the ordinary means of grace to gather and perfect the saints at Trinity?

I’ve been at Trinity in Easton for around a decade. Right before I arrived, the pastor left to join the Roman Catholic communion, which was a devastating blow to the congregation. For the past decade, I’ve had the unparalleled privilege of pastoring and shepherding and encouraging the saints in their walk with the Lord. As I said, apart from the Lord, my family is my chief delight, but just right in there, just as an unqualified delight is the service of the saints at Trinity. The elders, Charlie DeBoer, Joe Olliff, Luke DeBoer, Ian Parkin—a dear brother passed away about a year ago, went to be with the Lord—serving alongside those dear brothers in such a loving and giving congregation has been an oasis in the wilderness for me. I have delighted in my service, to know and love the congregation, to preach, teach, and serve alongside those brothers on the Session. The congregation over the years has grown to be what I would consider now to be a thriving, vibrant congregation filled with delightful people. I don’t want to overuse the George Bailey allusion, so I’ll change here, but I’ve been spoiled. And there is no end in sight from my side in terms of the service there. It continues to be an increasing joy for me. To see the way the Lord blesses through slow, steady, self-conscious means of grace, through Word and sacrament, through visiting and getting to know them as brothers and sisters in the Lord, walking beside them, bearing burdens, turning them to the sufferings and the comfort that are in Jesus Christ. I’ve always wanted to be a pastor; I was never initially aspiring to be a professor. And the Lord has granted me one of the deepest desires of my heart. Once again, I’m just so thankful for it.

That is tremendous, brother. To follow up for those who don’t know, who is George Bailey? And would your elaborate a bit upon what you’re preaching and teaching through these days and share any particular insights you might have from your studies in the Word?

If you remember, Jimmy Stewart played George Bailey in an all-time Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life. And the long story short is that he finds that the money, the influence, the opportunity for notoriety, that all of those things pale mightily in comparison to having a group of people, family and friends, who gather around and love you and rejoice when you rejoice and mourn when you mourn. I don’t want to spoil it in case there are some younger folks out there who haven’t seen it, but at the end of the movie, when everyone’s coming into the house, doing something that’s just beautiful—I can’t resist the analogy. It’s delightful, whether it’s you brothers at Reformed Forum, whether it’s a number of dear brothers throughout the world, my loving family, the dear congregation, the Lord has just blessed me. And so I really do mean it, partly as a joke, but partly true: I’m like the George Bailey of Glenside, brother. I’m very thankful for it.

I’ve been preaching for some time on the book of Ephesians. I took about a one-year break and did some work on Hebrews 12 during the pandemic to talk about the unshakable kingdom. No matter what happens in this world, we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Over the past several months, I’ve been preaching through the armor of God and Ephesians 6, which is Christ, and have looked at how that armor is fundamentally putting on Christ, his ordinances, his Word, his Spirit, and by faith rising up with his people to fight against the principalities and powers of this present evil age, to set forth the truth of the gospel and its antithetical, full-orbed glory, and to recognize that no matter what happens in terms of the escalation of evil around us in the culture or in the world, Jesus Christ has established his Church. The gates of hell will not prevail against it because the Lord who is our armor has gone before us, destroyed his and our enemies and is in the process of making them a footstool for his feet, which will reach its climax in his glorious, visible second coming.

It’s been a delight to preach through that that book, and I’m kind of coming up on the end of it. You never know; I can’t ever calculate how many more sermons are in the hopper for it. But we’re moving toward the end of the Ephesians 6, and it has been an unusually rich feast for me to preach through. You think you understand the text until you work on it week in and week out for weeks, months, or years, and so it has been peculiarly rich for me. I’ve been very encouraged doing it. Of course, I have—I don’t want to diminish any other congregations in the world—but I might have the most patient and loving congregation in the OPC. They have stayed through it all, and we’ve taken a slow, careful look at that text and just feasted on the Christ who is revealed in it. It’s been a delight.

Now you’re a bit unusual as a minister in the OPC because you not only have the privilege of preaching twice every Lord’s day and doing Sunday school and visitation and serving the saints in Easton, but you’re also a Fellow of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Reformed Forum. How are you actively engaged in the Colossians 1:28 mission of Reformed Forum in that particular capacity?

Let me begin by saying Reformed Forum has been and always will be a pure labor of love for me. You do not find anything like it anymore. In the past, there were some that were striving for this, but the combination of militancy and love, distinctive commitments to the Confession, Van Til, Vos Kline, and the development of what you might call the old Westminster theology or the first generation OPC theology, enriched by people like Kline, Gaffin, Strimple, and others—that’s unique to Reformed Forum. The ministry is so distinctive, while at the same time not succumbing to these biblicist, mutualist perversions that you find in the evangelical and ostensibly “Reformed” world of contemporary vintage in the last 20 years. At Reformed Forum you’ve got a catholic, Reformed, robust ministry of Reformed theology with Colossians 1:28 as the mission, seeking to present everyone mature in Christ.

My service, whether it pertains to the Reformed Academy and teaching courses on Van Til, Reformed Forum conferences—we’ve got one coming up that I’m so excited I can barely contain myself over—or the books that I’ve been graciously given the opportunity to write for Reformed Forum—Foundations of Covenant Theology, the Van Til book [The Trinitarian Theology of Cornelius Van Til], and several on the way—all continues to be a joy in the Lord. I don’t feel like in any of this that I’m working. I’m serving with joy, gladness, and peace and would not want to be anywhere in the whole world serving in except Reformed Forum. So again, I said about pastoring that the Lord’s given me the desire of my heart. Serving with Reformed Forum, though, it’s just been a delight that the Lord has brought. There are people that I won’t mention by name, but they have engaged in extraordinary giving and continue to give in ways that astound me to enable this kind of ministry. They have my deepest gratitude and admiration in the Lord. So, brother, as long as the Lord continues to cause Reformed Forum to flourish, and I have the ability and capacity and strength to serve, the duty is delight. They go right together.

To have over 3800 students in 75 countries involved at Reformed Forum, and to see it exploding in terms of worldwide outreach and ministry and serving the global church so profoundly, that especially gives me unbridled joy in the Lord. I pray that the Lord will continue making Reformed Forum this growing servant of the universal, worldwide Church. I love everything about Reformed Forum, but that, in particular, really is close to my heart to be able to serve brothers and sisters in different countries, under great persecution, who otherwise don’t have access to this kind of theology. To be able to serve them with rich, Reformed theology in the way that Reformed Form enables, and with the quality in terms of the platform and the presentation, as men committed to the deeper Protestant conception, it’s very exciting. I’m thankful to be a part of it, and I’m thankful to see the way the Lord has been blessing it. I’ve been amazed at the way that the Lord is causing Reformed Forum’s ministry to explode throughout the world. And it’s all of the Lord, so we give him glory.

In terms of that worldwide explosion, would you at liberty to share about any of the work that you’ve done with our brethren in China or Cambodia?

I’ll give you just one example. I’ve had an opportunity with a dear brother to talk to numbers of brothers in China, engaging in the training of pastors. I’ve taught a course to brothers in the Lord who are serving and pastoring. I just recently recorded some sermons that will be a part of a conference coming up, and I believe that there are going to be around 1200 people attending. For the last decade, I’ve had opportunities pre-COVID to go to Hong Kong to engage in service of these Chinese brothers and sisters. I can just testify to this: the Lord is giving them extraordinary grace and deep conviction. If Reformed theology in seminaries in this country is on the decline, which it is, and if the broad evangelicalism of this country is strangling true piety and vibrant doctrine, which it is, if liberalism and Barth and the post-conservative evangelical, post-liberal movements are divesting the system of doctrine of its vitality and substance, which it is—as you see a relative decline in the West, these brothers are on fire. The persecution that they are receiving is only causing more and more joy and vigor and militancy to make Christ known and to have an opportunity to serve. I’m going to stop because this gets me choked up, brother, but to have the honor and the privilege to serve such brothers whose hearts are so clearly cruciform and cross-stamped, serving the Lord, not seeking treasure on Earth but in heaven, it’s amazing. That opportunity and ongoing attempts to partner with those brothers, it’s just a delight.

Amen, brother. What you’re saying resonates in a peculiar way with me as I’ve had the great joy of regularly corresponding and working with many brothers and sisters in mainland China and Taiwan through our Reformed Academy. I’m consistently blown away by how they are willing to joyfully lay their lives down for the gospel. They often suffer much hardship for the sake of our Savior in their families and work, and yet at the end of the day, they still have the Spirit-wrought energy and zeal do the difficult work of translation and subtitle correction for us at Reformed Forum. They labor for nothing but for the glory of God and to see the riches of the Reformed faith flourish in their land. I’m truly in awe of what the Lord is pleased to do in bringing Reformed Forum these connections with saints that weren’t on my radar, but they were on the Lord’s radar. He is bringing the Church, his global family, together even while the world is at war. Chinese believers and Western believers are loving one another and are growing unto perfection in Christ.

It is of the Lord. They are the dearest of brothers and sisters, so praise the Lord for them.

As we come to the close of our interview, how might our friends and supporters around the world pray for you and your ministry?

I really appreciate you asking. Pray for my wife to continue to flourish and for our relationship to grow; for my children to continue to flourish and walk with the Lord as they’re doing; for faithfulness in ministry at Trinity, preservation of the elders and growth of the congregation. Pray also for the work at Reformed Forum to move forward with people recognizing that we give all of our resources up front for free. Pray that the Lord would raise up people to support Reformed Forum’s work so that this global outreach, these 3800 plus students from 75 countries, could continue to be served. Pray that the Lord would make Reformed Forum faithful in serving the church and not be distracted by any other mission outside of the mission of Colossians 1:28, to seek to present everyone mature in Christ through the presentation of what the Scriptures teach as received and expounded and enriched in our Reformed confessional tradition. Prayer along all those lines, and that the Lord would make me personally faithful in love and in truth for the sake of Christ would be deeply appreciated.

Carlton Wynne, Lane Tipton, and Camden Bucey open Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith to pages 43–47. Van Til addresses the unity and diversity within creation before covering the fall into sin and the curse.

Throughout this chapter, Van Til reminds his readers of the categorical difference between God and creation while maintaining creation’s dependence upon God for its very existence. The answers to these fundamental questions distinguish orthodox Christianity from all other philosophies and religions.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:03:52 Thoughts on Learning Van Til
• 00:12:32 Temporal Unity and Plurality
• 00:24:30 Non-Being
• 00:36:56 Reformed vs. Roman Catholic Conceptions of Nature and Sin
• 00:49:58 The Mystery of the Fall into Sin
• 00:56:49 Created Laws and Facts
• 01:03:42 Van Til the Evangelist and Van Til the Theologian
• 01:06:33 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Lane Tipton speaks about his new course on Van Til’s doctrine of revelation, which is the third course in our Fellowship in Reformed Apologetics. In this course, Dr. Tipton covers:

1. The implications of the self-contained and immutable Trinity for a doctrine of revelation in the work of creation and in the special act of providence in covenantal condescension
2. The distinctive character of natural revelation and the natural knowledge of God in Reformed theology, set in comparison and contrast to the views of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth
3. The relation between natural and supernatural, or general and special revelation, giving special attention to Van Til’s key essay, “Nature and Scripture”
4. The Vosian doctrine of eschatology as it bears upon the distinction and the relation of God’s revelation in nature and God’s revelation in covenant (and in Scripture).

The course gives sustained attention to a close reading of central primary sources in Van Til’s corpus that bear on his doctrine of the revelation of the self-contained Trinity in nature and in covenant.

Before sharing one of the lectures from the course, Lane and Camden compare and contrast Cornelius Van Til’s theology with that of Thomas Aquinas on the natural knowledge of God as well as man’s religious fellowship with God.

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Introduction
• 00:01:23 The Fellowship in Reformed Apologetics
• 00:17:51 Van Til and Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Knowledge of God
• 00:23:33 Differences between Roman Catholic and Reformed Natural Theology
• 00:31:15 Thomas Aquinas on the Natural Knowledge of God
• 00:38:10 Aquinas on Ontological Re-Proportioning to Participate in the Essence of God
• 00:44:35 Preview Lecture on Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Knowledge of God
• 01:11:24 Conclusion

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton

Danny Olinger and John Muether join Camden Bucey to speak about the early history of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the forces within the young ecclesiastical body desiring broader influence throughout the culture.

J. Gresham Machen gathered a broad coalition of “fundamentalists” in leading a charge against modernism at Princeton Theological Seminary and then throughout the Presbyterian Church (USA). After many within this coalition were pushed out or left to form what would become the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, different agendas arose. A significant event—involving what would come to be known as the Committee of Nine—at the 1941 and 1942 General Assemblies would set the tone for the future of the young church.

For further study:

• Hakkenberg, Michael A. “The Battle over the Ordination of Gordon H. Clark.” In Pressing toward the Mark: Essays Commemorating Fifty Years of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, edited by Charles G. Dennison and Richard C. Gamble, 329–50. Philadelphia: Committee for the Historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1986.
• Woolley, Paul. “Discontent!” The Presbyterian Guardian 13, no. 14 (July 25, 1944): 213–14.
• Minutes from the ninth General Assembly of the OPC (the reports of the committee begin on p. 28)

Participants: Camden Bucey, Danny Olinger, John Muether

Carlton Wynne, Lane Tipton, and Camden Bucey open Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith to pages 33–39 wherein Van Til discusses the doctrine of salvation. Van Til is insistent to maintain the incommunicable attributes of God in all aspects of theology, even here in soteriology. Throughout this section, Van Til refuses to admit any form of mutualism or correlativism in the God-man relation. He writes, “If we refuse to mix the eternal and the temporal at the point of creation and at the point of the incarnation we must also refuse to mix them at the point of salvation.”

If God is omnipotent, for example, and he desires to save, it is not possible for man to frustrate that plan. This carries through in the doctrine of church as well as the doctrine of last things, wherein the absolute sovereignty of God is maintained at every point throughout history.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Lane Tipton discusses “Van Til’s Trinitarian Theology,” the latest on-demand video course released with Reformed Academy. Designed to equip the student to engage critically central issues in trinitarian theology, this course will focus on the architectonic significance of the Trinity both in Van Til’s theology and apologetics. Special attention will be given to Van Til’s historical and theological context, his theology of triune personhood, the structure and function of the representational principle, the distinctively trinitarian character of the transcendental method, and his rejection of all species of correlativism, ranging from Karl Barth to contemporary expressions of Evangelical mutualism.

Enroll for free at https://www.reformedforum.org/courses/van-tils-trinitarian-theology

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

Ryan Noha brings his collection of Van Til books to the studio for show-and-tell. Join us for a surreal Reformed home shopping network experience. This was recorded in the summer of 2020 along with our course Introduction to the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Lane G. Tipton, Ryan Noha

Lane Tipton, Carlton Wynne, and Camden Bucey discuss pages 25–29 of Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith. In this section, Van Til details the doctrine of God that structures his apologetic thought. A Reformed apologetic seeks first to understand the nature of the God it seeks to set forth and defend. In Van Til’s estimate, we must ask “what kind” of a God we believe in before we can proceed in any meaningful way to set for the arguments for the existence and revelation of this God.

Links

• Lane Tipton lectures from Mid-America Reformed Seminary: “Van Til’s Trinitarian Theology: Reformed or Revisionist?“

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

In the spirit of our Vos Group episodes, we begin a concurrent venture into Cornelius Van Til’s book, The Defense of the Faith. Carlton Wynne joins Lane Tipton and Camden Bucey to discuss the theology and apologetics of this significant twenty-first century Reformed apologist.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Carlton Wynne, Lane G. Tipton

In this episode, we discuss a new online course wherein Dr. Lane G. Tipton teaches a thorough introduction to the theology and innovative apologetic method of Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987), a pioneer in a distinctly Reformed approach to defending the faith.

This course investigates the context, structure, and significance of Van Til’s theology and apologetics. It is designed to introduce students to the main influences and fundamental concerns of Van Til’s theological approach to apologetics. Topics include a general introduction, Trinity, image of God, covenant, revelation, worldview, antithesis, common grace, and idealism. Special attention is given to the programmatic deep structures of Van Til’s thought, distinguishing his views from Roman Catholicism, Barth, and Evangelical approaches to theology and apologetics.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Lane G. Tipton

On February 7, 1951, Cornelius Van Til wrote an insightful letter to neo-evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry. While it was written sixty-nine years ago, the letter demonstrates Van Til’s awareness of contemporary issues in theology proper while also anticipating those in our present context. His criticism applies to doctrinal formulations arising within the Thomistic and Barthian traditions. Oddly enough, it also applies to formulations of theologians closely identified with his own legacy such as John Frame and K. Scott Oliphint, who qualify divine immutability and impassibility with respect to the Creator-creature relation in order to identify a principle of unity between the two.

The following excerpt is from Cornelius Van Til, letter to Carl F. H. Henry, February 7, 1951, archives of the Montgomery Library, Westminster Theological Seminary.

Modern philosophy, realizing that the staticism of the Greeks led into a blind alley has assumed that all reality is basically temporal (Realitat zeitigt sich). That is Kant’s great contribution. But the contrast between modern and ancient philosophy on this matter is not absolute. All non-Christian philosophy assumes that change or chance is ultimate. Not holding to the Creator-creature distinction all non-Christians are not only monists and staticists but also pluralists and temporalists. Chance has some spot in all non-Christian systems; it is given a larger place in modern than in ancient philosophy.

Accordingly, it is our business as Christians to begin our interpretation of reality upon the presupposition of the Creator-creature distinction as basic to everything else. We must refuse to say one single word about the nature of reality as a whole before we introduce the Creator-creature distinction. If with Aquinas we first start speaking about reality and say that it is analogical then we can never after that come to the Christian doctrine of God as Creator and controller of the world. We should argue that intelligent predication is impossible except one make the Creator-creature distinction basic to one’s thought. The fact that speculation is wholly self-frustrative on any but the Christian basis can be shown easily. On any non-Christian basis a man must either know everything so that he need not ask questions or he knows nothing so that he cannot ask questions (But I need not go into this).

Starting with the Creator-creature distinction as basic to one’s thought one need not and in fact cannot after that discuss such concepts as time and eternity by themselves. By themselves they are abstractions. True we can speak of them by themselves as we can speak of the justice of God by itself. But when we speak of the justice of God by itself we always insist that it is the justice of God, that it is an attribute of God. The justice of God is therefore interwoven with the other attributes of God and with the being of God. So also with eternity. It is the eternity of God. And God is man’s creator. And time is characteristic of the created world.

As then it is fatal to fail to introduce the Creator-creature distinction at the outset of one’s thought so it is also fatal to fail to think of eternity as exclusively a characteristic of God and of time as exclusively a characteristic of the created world. It would be to make God subject to the conditions of his creatures, subject to change, etc.

This is I think the only sound approach to the matter. But admittedly it is only an approach. We cannot ever conceptualize the relation between God’s eternity and man’s temporality for the reason that we cannot conceptualize the relation of God to his creature. The Greeks wanted to conceptualize the relation of god to man and they came to the conclusion that both are eternal. The modern man wants to conceptualize the relation between the two and comes to the conclusion that both are temporal. The Christian position stands squarely over against both by its starting point.

The Greek and the modern views both want to conceptualize the relation between God and man because they want a principle of unity that outreaches both. They think that on a Christian basis one is bound to dualism, authoritarianism, etc. As it turns out it is only on the frankly and most consistently Christian basis that ultimate dualism can be avoided. It cannot be avoided in the sense that man can ever expect to understand exhaustively but it can be avoided by presupposing God, who is not subject to the limits of man, as the positive presupposition of human predication.

It is therefore not so much a matter of detailed exegesis but of the consistent application of basically biblical concepts that is important in setting the Christian position over against both the ancient and the modern forms of paganism. The sad results of a failure to do so can best be seen in the latest works of Barth.

For historical context and biographical information, consult John R. Muether, Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman (P&R Publishing, 2008), especially pp. 119–178. For my interaction with the thesis represented in K. Scott Oliphint, God with Us, read this post. For a helpful summary and treatment of what James Dolezal identifies as “theological mutualism,” I suggest reading his book, All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017). Readers would also benefit from a careful study of several Reformed dogmatics, especially Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:95–177 and Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:3–37, 177–182.

Jim Cassidy previews his address at the 2018 Reformed Forum conference by speaking about Barth on the analogy of being and the analogy of faith and how his views relate to the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Jim and Camden also speak about Barth’s views of natural theology and how they relate to the views of Cornelius Van Til. This is in response to recent remarks from Dr. Michael Allen on the Credo Magazine podcast (around minute 37). If you’d like to jump directly to that portion of our discussion, you can watch it on YouTube.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

We discuss how a return to sola scriptura through confessional Reformed theology spares us from the errors of Roman Catholicism and modernism. Reformed covenant theology, broadly considered, is facing a crisis regarding what constitutes “reformed” theology. The situation currently is one of chaos and confusion. Some claim that the way forward is by way of retrieving the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor of the Roman Catholic church, in the service of a so-called “Reformed” apologetic. The line of this argument is that if you follow the Roman Catholic theology and method of Aquinas, you will arrive at Protestant conclusions. Others enlist Aquinas in conversation with the likes of John Webster and Karl Barth, in the interest of retrieving “catholic” tradition in the development of a reformed theological identity. Still others, outside of our reformed circles, are engaged in ecumenical dialogue between Thomas and Barth (Bruce McCormack and Thomas Joseph White’s Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Dialogue, or Keith Johnson’s Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis, which helpfully to my mind points out the significant points of convergence between the two theologians). It is very much worth pointing out that Van Til virtually predicted this in advance in his sadly neglected but highly important work Confession of 1967, where he says, “If now we live in a dialogical age and if only the church as ecumenical can meet the needs of such an age, then surely the Roman Catholic too must learn to see this fact. As Martin Marty says, “If Protestants and Roman Catholics wish to make possible a creative coexistence, to enrich our pluralistic society, and to profit from each other’s separate histories, they will have to participate in dialogue.…” And what does such “dialogue” look like? Again, Van Til says, “It was Hans Urs von Balthasar who, more than anyone else, has helped Barth to see that Roman Catholicism also begins its theology from the Christ-Event. Roman Catholicism, says von Balthasar, does not believe in direct revelation any more than does Barth. To be sure, Rome does speak of “faith and works,” of “nature and grace,” of “reason and revelation.” But this “and” is not, as Barth thinks, fatal to the idea of the primacy of Christ and of faith in Christ. The whole discussion between Barth and the Roman Catholic position may therefore start from the idea that revelation is revelation in hiddenness. ”The difference between Barth and Roman Catholicism will therefore be not of principle but of degree” (Confession, 119).

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

David Owen Filson joins us to speak about Dr. J. Oliver Buswell, theologian and former president of Wheaton College and Covenant College and Seminary. Buswell was involved with the early modernist-fundamentalist controversy and the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, though he joined the Bible Presbyterian Church when it split with the fledgling OPC over premillennialism and teetotalism. He continued to be an interlocutor with members of the OPC and faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Interestingly, he coined the term “presuppositionalism” while debating with Cornelius Van Til over apologetic and theological method. Dr. Filson is teaching pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. He previously spoke on the subject in episode 316, January 17, 2014.

Participants: Camden Bucey, David Filson, Jeff Waddington

Pierce Taylor Hibbs speaks about language and the Trinity. His book, The Trinity, Language, and Human Behavior: A Reformed Exposition of the Language Theory of Kenneth L. Pike is available in P&R Publishing’s Reformed Academic Dissertations series. Hibbs describes Kenneth Pike’s linguistic theory and compares it to the theology of Cornelius Van Til, demonstrating shared Trinitarian themes. Pierce Hibbs is the Assistant Director of the Theological English Department at Westminster Theological Seminary. He writes at piercetaylorhibbs.com.

Links

• Who is Kenneth Pike?

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jeff Waddington, Pierce Taylor Hibbs

Part of a good transcendental critique must be drawing the lines between the dots for people to see clearly. If I have any critique of Van Til, it is that he could have done better connecting those dots. He observes things in people’s thought with uncanny penetration and insight. And he will often state that their position entails something else, often an unwelcomed theological conclusion. And he seems to be right when he draws the dots. However, he often leaves us dangling and does not always connect the dots explicitly. If we can improve on Van Til anywhere it is here: connect the dots more explicitly, while penetrating deeply and critiquing transcendentally (as Van Til did). An example of what I am talking about is found in his The Theology of James Daane. There Van Til says that Arminians cannot do justice to the idea of an infallible Bible (p. 24). On the surface that sounds absurd because many Arminians believe in infallibility. But his point is that once you deny an absolutely sovereign God who stands back of all history and events, direct inspiration and the assurance that human authors are kept from error fails. In other words, a god that is not absolutely sovereign cannot have contact with creation, and even if he could he cannot speak with any level of absolute certainly. But he does not write that large with explicit clarity. He does not walk us through the logic of why “A” necessarily entails “B” (not just in this instance, but in almost every system of thought he critiques). I think that is how we can advance Van Til today. Not by changing or toning down what he said (as some “Van Tillians” would have it), but by making more explicit and lucid what he did say.

“Yet the Aristotelianism of Rome, with its idea of potentiality, offers, we are bound to think, a point of contact with the underlying philosophy of Dialecticism. Rome occupies an intermediary position.”[1] What has Basel to do with Rome? In the above quotation Van Til is making a startling point. On the one hand earlier on in the paragraph he acknowledges that Rome has way too much orthodoxy in it for there to be an easy alignment with “the theology of Crisis.” Nevertheless, Rome’s theology and the theology of Basel are not devoid of all commonalities. So, when he speaks of “the Aristotelianism of Rome” he has in mind, of course, the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Van Til, rightly or wrongly, always associates Roman Catholicism with Thomism. But what is most important here for our purposes is to identify what he means by Rome’s “idea of potentiality.” We need to be brief here (a fuller scholarly treatment of this subject is beyond our purview). But the idea of “potentiality” entails what some call a chain, or scale, of being. Potency is understood opposite of actuality. And every thing has potency, which means it has potential toward actualization. Only God is pure actuality, having no potency in himself. Everything else is on its way toward actualization. This idea is often connected with the idea of the analogia entis – or analogy of being. Things on the scale of being – God who is the greatest being, man as an actualizing agent – relate to one another analogically. While there is much dissimilarity between God and man – God is fully actualized, we are not – there is also a commonality as well: God and man are both beings. So, it is an analogy based on the fact of what God and man have in common: being. And while God and man differ quantitatively in their being they are not qualitatively different. So, what has this to do with Barth (here Van Til uses the broader term “Dialecticism,” but he has primarily Barth in mind)? After all, does Van Til not know that Barth absolutely rejected the analogia entis (goes so far as associating it with the anti-Christ)? Does Van Til not know that Barth speaks about the “qualitative difference between eternity and time?” Where in the world could Van Til find common cause between Aquinas and Barth? While it is true that Barth begins with the “qualitative difference between time and eternity” he does not stay there. Especially as his theology develops from the time of his Romans commentary, he recognizes that he cannot stop with the qualitative difference if God and man are ever to be reconciled. Somehow God and man, time and eternity, the Creator and creature must be brought together. At the same time his actualistic doctrine of God does not allow him to have a God who is eternal or timeless in the absolute sense. So he speaks about “God’s time.” For Barth God’s time is his time of grace in the eternal decree who is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is himself both the electing God and the elect man. With that, then, Jesus Christ is both the eternal God and the temporal man. And he is such in his eternal nature. There is for Barth no logos asarkos, that is a Christ who is ever understood as being without flesh and therefore without time. Jesus Christ is himself “God’s time for us.” That means that God and man, eternity and time, are co-terminus realities. The relationship between God and man is relative and not absolute. For God is forever and from all eternity this God who has time for us in Jesus Christ. To be sure, this is not the same thing exactly as Thomas’ analogy of being. It is more like an analogy of God’s time. And while the construction differs, what remains as a common ground between Thomas and Barth are their commitment to placing God and man in a relative relationship rather than an absolute one. Both Thomas and Barth then stand over against the Reformed understanding of how God and man relate. For the Reformed God and man relate covenantally. They both have a relationship in absolute distinction from the beginning. The way in which they relate, then, is not through some kind of ontological bond. Rather, the bond is covenantal. It is a relation established by God and guaranteed and sealed by divine fiat – not through bringing God and man in under a common ontological reality (being for Thomas, time for Barth). But there is one last commonality between Thomas and Barth, and it is based on the commitment to their respective views of analogy. And that is they both stand in antithesis to the Reformed Faith. Reformed theology will not allow this common sharing or an ontological bond between God and man. For the problem between God and man is not ontology. The problem is a matter of hamartiology. And the solution is soteriological and covenantal. And therein lies the difference between the Reformed Faith on the one hand and Thomas and Barth on the other.

[1] Van Til, C. (1947). The new modernism: an appraisal of the theology of Barth and Brunner. The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia. P. 8.

In The New Modernism Van Til identifies the Theology of Crisis with “dialectical theology.” But what is dialectical theology? Van Til explains that dialectical theology is “at bottom activistic and positivistic.” But what in the world does that mean? He explains: “God’s being and God’s work are said to be one and the same” (p. 3). In other words, Barth’s theology is actualistic. “Actualism” is a distinctly modern approach to metaphysics, or the study of the nature of reality. It is the question of being qua being. Metaphysics seeks to discover what the essence of something or someone is. Standing over against dialectical theology – which Van Til equates with “modern theology” as a whole – is the Reformed Faith which is “non-activistic theology” (ibid). Continuing his thesis, dialectical theology (or, Crisis Theology) and Reformed Theology are opposed to one another. But how are they opposed? In order to answer that question we have to explain why it is that Van Til associates dialectical theology with modern theology. Modern thought, going back at least to Kant, rejects the older metaphysical tradition. That tradition is characterized by the influence of Greek metaphysical thought, especially as it influenced Western theology through Thomas Aquinas. This mode of metaphysics adheres to the idea that everything has its own particular static nature (i.e., a nature that does not change). In this mode of thinking God was understood, according to modern thinkers, as a static and abstract nature, essence, or substance. An example of this would be in the traditional doctrine of God’s immutability. Modern thinking said that this makes God out to be aloof, cold, unfeeling and abstract. He cannot change or adjust to situations. In short, he has nothing to do with us here and now. Modern thought with its rejection of medieval metaphysics proposed instead for us to think about being or ontology in dynamic terms. In this way we understand God not in terms of an abstract substance, but rather as a concrete, dynamic and living act. This is the actualism (or, more commonly used is the term “activism”) of which Van Til speaks. God’s identity, his being, is understood only in terms of his acts relative to us his creatures. Now, Van Til sees this approach to metaphysics, or ontology, as opposed to the older traditional approach. He says only in the Reformed Faith is God “wholly self-contained.”[1] What does that mean? It means, in short, that God is in no way identified or understood as existing in a way that is dependent upon the creature or his acts relative to it. This is in keeping with the older theology proper which understood God as being a se. God in himself does not progress or become. He is himself perfect in his being, pure act with no potentiality. That means his interaction with the creature is completely unnecessary to who he is. But standing over against this traditional view is Barth’s commitment to the terms for ontology set by modernity. Liberalism did not like the cold, aloof God of traditional theology. So they made God to draw near to man in an immanent relationship to the creature. Liberalism was committed to actualistic ontology, identifying God with his acts toward creature. Barth opposed liberalism and emphasized God’s transcendence. But – and this is Van Til’s great observation – while emphasizing God’s transcendence Barth at the same time refused to surrender the modern and liberal commitment to actualistic ontology. However, rather than God being identified with the creature in an immanent act, for Barth God is identified with his transcendent act of electing grace. For Barth God is necessarily gracious because in a transcendent act of his own freedom he chooses to always and everywhere be the God who forgives in Jesus Christ. Therefore, as I try to show in my book, God’s eternity is not a purely eternal attribute.[2] But his eternity is simultaneously his time for us in Jesus Christ. In other words, God from all of eternity is not “self-contained” but has his being identified with his act of grace for us in Christ. And so here – no less than in liberalism – God is dependent on the creature for his being. Creation and redemption (not to mention revelation) for Barth are not contingent acts of God, but necessary acts which give identity to the question of who he is. Actuality dictates ontology. And for the older orthodox Reformed view that is a completely contrary starting point for understanding God. For the older view, God’s being (ontology) dictates the activity of God in time. God’s acts are consistent with and flow from who he is in and of himself. Only this way can we say in any true and meaningful way that God acts in perfect freedom. As the answer to the children’s catechism goes: Can God do all things? Yes, God can do all his holy will. In these simple – yet profound – words we discover the reason why Van Til is so clear: Dialectical Theology and Reformed Theology are – and must be – sworn enemies. There is no common ground between them.

[1] When Van Til speaks about “the Reformed Faith” that is representative shorthand for Reformed orthodoxy. Particularly as it comes to expression in great Reformed church creeds and confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is certainly a legitimate criticism here that Van Til uses a term that is both too imprecise and narrow. To be sure, there is enough variety in the history of Reformed theology and Reformed confessions to say that “the Reformed faith” is not as monolithic as Van Til seems here to assume. While we may grant that point it is important to note that Van Til’s work is not so much concerned with historical theology and the nuances found in the Reformed tradition, rather his work is “frankly polemical” (p. 3). But the granted point need not detract us because despite all the variety that there is in the Reformed confessional tradition, one thing most certainly is not: actualistic ontology. [2] See God’s Time For Us: Barth’s Reconciliation of Eternity and Time in Jesus Christ (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2016).

As we continue to unpack Van Til’s review of Zerbe’s book we come to the second part of the review, which concerns Barth’s epistemology. Van Til opens with an absurd claim, and then unpacks what he means:

[Barth] has no room for revelation. At first blush it would seem as though the very opposite were the case. He says that only in the eternal is true knowledge. He says that all knowledge comes by revelation. …. Karl Barth says that all knowledge for man as well as for God is based upon analysis of the eternal truths that exist apart from time. The ideal of knowledge for man as well as for God is complete comprehension. Knowledge is no knowledge unless it is completely comprehensive. … God and man are engaged in a common analysis of principles that exist independently of both.

It is statements like “Barth has no room for revelation” that tend to get Van Til into trouble! The statement, on the surface anyhow, seems ridiculous. But Van Til is quick to acknowledge that his statement can seem absurd. He notes that a surface read (“at first blush”) of Barth would prove the absurdity. After all Barth says that “all knowledge comes by revelation.” Now, there are two points that need to be made here. One of the points Van Til says here, the other he does not. First, Van Til understands that for Barth for a person to know something that person must know it comprehensively. I think Van Til is on solid ground here. Barth will often indicate that man cannot know God because man as limited and the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. God is eternal, we are temporal and therefore we cannot know the eternal. This is what Van Til means by “eternal truths.” Truth is eternal, and therefore in order for there to be true knowledge of those truths one must likewise be eternal. And here only God qualifies because only he is eternal. The trouble here is that truth, eternal truth, is an abstraction. It is a kind of tertium quid which is neither God nor man. Truth is independent of both. It is an object, quite distinct from both God and man. It is only potentially known by either God and man (i.e., “all knowledge for man as well as for God is based upon analysis of the eternal truths that exist apart from time”). And only God has the kind of mind that qualifies for knowing eternal truths comprehensively. Therefore, only God can know, man cannot. The upshot to all this is that if there is going to be revelation at all it must be something that takes place in eternity (i.e., transcendentally). It must be an act that takes place quite apart from and above us. This means, for Van Til, Barth has no room for revelation as it has been traditionally conceived. Barth has a doctrine of revelation to be sure, but according to Van Til it is not a biblical doctrine of revelation. Second, the way in which Barth solves this problem is through Jesus Christ. Van Til does not say this here, though he will articulate it in his later writings. Jesus Christ alone is revelation. Revelation is not, therefore, a thing that can be grasped. It is not words captured on a page nor man’s experience of absolute dependence. It is God making himself known in a divine act of grace in Jesus Christ. Christ is himself both sides – the divine and human – of revelation. This is an eternal act that takes place quite transcendently relative to us living in the hear and now. Only in Jesus Christ is God made known, to himself in Jesus Christ, comprehensively. The problem with this view, according to Van Til, is twofold. First, God and man are in similar epistemological positions. Both are subject to eternal truths. However, God has an advantage; a qualitatively greater advantage. He can know those truths because he is himself eternal. Man cannot, because he is not eternal. But still, God and man both have the same object of their knowledge – eternal truths. Nevertheless, God is relativized by these eternal truths which he himself must know. In this way, as Van Til will later note, the universe is therefore superior to God. Because eternal truths and God are co-existent the creator-creature distinction is eliminated. To be sure, Barth would never say that. But that is what Van Til believes it amounts to. Coordinated with this problem is the fact that man cannot know God (nor can he know eternal truths). If man cannot know comprehensively then he cannot know truly. And he cannot know eternal truths comprehensively, and therefore not truly. He also cannot know God truly because he cannot know God comprehensively. At the end of the day man must be skeptical about God, and with his skepticism about God he must be skeptical about all things. At the end of the day Barth is both a a rationalist (because God and man have the same source and object of knowledge – eternal truths) and an irrationalist (because man cannot know God, or anything eternal for that matter). And because of this, Barth has no room for revelation as revelation has been historically and biblically understood in Reformed theology.

When I first heard about Barth’s concept of the “wholly other” God, it sounded perfectly orthodox. Barth’s emphasis on the qualitative difference between God and man struck me as nothing but good Reformed theology. In addition, I had heard that Barth protested against the Liberal idea of identifying God’s being with man’s subjective experience. Surely Barth is a friend of Reformed theology! And that would be the case if that was all Barth said about the relation between God and man. However, it was not. Barth understood that he couldn’t stop there. He had the Christian sense to know that one cannot stop with the absolute qualitative difference between God and man. Had he stopped there there would be no hope in his theology. There would only be separation between God and man. He knew somehow that he had to bring God and man together, even if but dialectically. Liberalism did that through identifying God with man in man’s experience. Barth, however, would take the opposite position. He would reconcile God and man in God’s experience. We continue to unpack Van Til’s initial salvo against Barth, which is a 1931 Christianity Today book review. Van Til also was grateful for Barth’s “wholly other” God. However, he was not so sanguine about how Barth brings God and man together:

Barth has made God to be highly exalted above time. For this we would be sincerely grateful. Only thus is God seen to be qualitatively distinct from man. Only thus can we stand strong against Modernism. But Barth has also made man to be highly exalted above time. For this we are sincerely sorry. By doing this Barth has completely neutralized the exaltation of God. By doing this God is no longer qualitatively distinct from man. Modern theology holds that both God and man are temporal. Barth holds that both God and man are eternal. The results are identical.[1]

For Barth the fundamental problem and presupposition of all theology is ontological: God and man are qualitatively different and therefore separate. Reconciliation is therefore also ontological. God and man are reconciled only in the God-man. And the God-man is an eternal act of grace by which God and man are made one. There never was a time when the God-man was not. The God-man, Jesus Christ, is the resolution of the ontological problem by virtue of the gracious decree of God who wills our salvation in absolute freedom. This means that man, the man Jesus, is just as much a necessary aspect of the being of God as is his divine nature. Both the human and the divine share in the same transcendent time-event of God’s grace for us. So, as in liberalism God and man were identified in man’s feeling of absolute dependence, in Barth God and man are identified in the transcendent event of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. This eternal act of grace is what Barth calls “God’s time for us.” In this way, time (“eternal time”) and act replace “being” in the older Thomistic theology. In Thomas “being” was a kind of independent entity in which both the Creator and creature participate. God has being and man has being. But God’s being is infinite while man’s is finite. But in Barth “act” and “time” become the transcendent reality in which both God and man relate in the God-man, Jesus Christ. This means that God and man share in a common quality or entity, as in liberalism. The difference is that in liberalism the mutual participation is immanent whereas in Barth it is transcendent. But, according to Van Til, the same theological problems persist.

[1] Van Til, C., & Sigward, E. H. (1997). Reviews by Cornelius Van Til (Electronic ed.). Labels Army Company: New York.

In the last post we began to consider Van Til’s first published criticism of Barth. It was set in the context of a book review.[1] There we underscored Van Til’s criticism that Barth’s “theology is based upon an antitheistic theory of reality.” We noted that it was “antitheistic” because it was a “correlative theory of reality.” We said, in short, this means that God and man exist on the same, eternal, “plane” with one other in Jesus Christ. God’s identity, in some sense, depends on the creature. Van Til goes on in the review to unpack the implications of Barth’s “theory of reality:”

[Barth] even denies the real significance of the temporal world. The whole of history is to be condemned as worthless. The eternal is said to be everything and the temporal is said to be nothing. Does not this seem as though Barth holds to a genuine transcendence of God? Does it not seem as though transcendence means everything for Barth? It does seem so—but it is not truly so. Barth holds that “the only real history takes place in eternity.” If then man and the temporal universe in general are to have any significance at all they must be an aspect of God and as such be really as eternal as God. Anything to be real, says Barth, must transcend time. Man is real only in so far as he transcends time. We are true personalities only in so far as we are experiences of God. We are not to say with Descartes, I think therefore I am, or even with Hocking, I think God therefore I am, but we are to say, I am thought by God therefore I am. Abraham’s faith takes place in eternity. Resurrection means eternity. The entire epistle of Paul to the Romans is said to bring this one message that we must be eternalized. To be saved means to be conscious of one’s eternity.

Before unpacking this criticism, a few words of observation about it are in order:

1. Zerbe’s book and Van Til’s article are very early. Zerbe interacts with the German works of Barth, but his research only goes up to 1929 (co-authored volume Zur Lehre vom Heiligen Geist).
2. We know Van Til read Barth’s Church Dogmatics in German before it was translated into English. But it is impossible to tell from this review if Van Til is criticizing Barth in accordance with his own reading of Barth’s corpus up to 1931 or if his criticism is entirely or in part mediated by Zerbe’s reading. Given that the themes we see in Van Til here persist throughout his critical writings on Barth points us in the direction that Van Til was already conversant with the same early German writings Zerbe was working from.
3. This is not Van Til at his most nuanced. At first blush we may think that he is charging Barth with denying the reality of the temporal world. That is an understandable reaction, but on a more careful read Van Til is not leveling such a charge. We’ll discuss this more below, but when reading Van Til here we have to understand that he is speaking in generalities and is not as precise in his wording as he could have been (English being his second language and all).

OK, those qualifications having been stated, let’s unpack Van Til’s claims. That first sentence needs careful exegesis. What Van Til is critical of here is Barth’s denial of the “real” meaning of reality. He is not saying that Barth is denying reality, as if the world and the things around us do not actually exist. Here the word “significance” is important to get Van Til’s meaning. “Significance” for Van Til means “meaning” or “interpretation.” What he is saying, in short, is that Barth denies the real (read: divine) interpretation of reality. Yet more needs to be said. Whatever we want to say concerning Barth’s later theology, his earlier theology is most certainly characterized by the “crisis” that exists between eternity and time, or between God and man. Given this great divide our reality, history and present experience are cut off from God and his revelation. God and his revelation are of eternity, we are of time (and the twain shall not meet!). But, for Van Til, God only by his revelation can give to us the true (i.e., real) meaning (i.e., significance) of reality. And since God/eternity and man/time are qualitatively different without overlap or contact, there is no way for man to know the true interpretation of his experience. As Van Til goes on to note, the only way man/time can have any real God-given significance (i.e., meaning/interpretation) is for God to lift man/time up into his eternity, destroy its old fallen meaning and make it new (this process is called Aufhebung in German). And that God does in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is an eternal event of grace in which man/time is lifted up, destroyed and united to God. That does mean, as Van Til rightly notes (even if in a somewhat un-nuanced way), that time (and everything which is of the warp and woof of this present age) is but fallen, sinful and nothing. The only place where reality is something is in the real man, Jesus Christ who alone is the transcendent act of God’s grace for us. Everything else is fallen nothingness. Now, this is the position which I believe Barth holds for the rest of his life, whatever we may think of the qualifications he brings to it via a modern version of the analogia. Barth’s later theology would become much more orderly and systematic. But his early work forms a foundation which he will not reform in any significant way. So much more can and should be said about that. But for now, I hope I have brought a small measure of clarity to Van Til’s critique. My experience is that for those who actually have read Van Til on Barth have exercised very little patience in accurately and charitably understanding his main point. Granted, to get there one must wade through what is often time clunky English prose. The interpretation of Barth given by Van Til above, while coming with an admittedly negative tone, is far from being idiosyncratic or even particularly controversial (even among some of Barth’s most ardent supporters today).[2] I wonder if now isn’t a good time for both friends and critics of Barth to set aside personal emotions and take up Van Til afresh and give him another chance to help us reappraise the theology of Karl Barth.

[1] Review of The Karl Barth Theology: The New Transcendentalism, by Alvin S. Zerbe. Christianity Today 1/10 (Feb 1931): 13–14. The book reviewed is Alvin S. Zerbe, The Karl Barth Theology: The New Transcendentalism (Cleveland: Central Publishing House, 1930). [2] I recognize fully the need to unpack this claim and substantiate it more comprehensively. I aim to do just that in future posts.

Participants: Jeff Waddington

This episode was recorded just prior to our 2017 Theology Conference on The Reformation of Apologetics. We discuss the theological approach of scholasticism as it pertains to Thomas Aquinas, the Reformers, and Cornelius Van Til.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy

The Reformation of Apologetics, Session #5 Reformed Forum 2017 Theology Conference Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC)

Participants: Camden Bucey

The Reformation of Apologetics, Session #4 Reformed Forum 2017 Theology Conference Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC)

Participants: Lane G. Tipton

The Reformation of Apologetics, Session #2 Reformed Forum 2017 Theology Conference Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC) Download the handouts.

Participants: K. Scott Oliphint

The Reformation of Apologetics, Session #1 Reformed Forum 2017 Theology Conference Hope Presbyterian Church (OPC) Download the handouts.

Participants: K. Scott Oliphint

This episode was recorded live at our 2017 Theology Conference on The Reformation of Apologetics. In celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation and the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Cornelius Van Til, we consider the connection between Reformed apologetics and the five solas. The solas summarize the theological principles of the Reformation, and while one may not consider apologetics to be a major discipline of the Reformation, we seek to show how the Reformation dictates a consistent apologetic method. We contend that to be a covenantal apologist, one must be a Reformed theologian. Moreover, to be a consistent Reformed theologian, one must be a covenantal apologist.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Glen Clary, Jeff Waddington, Jim Cassidy, Lane G. Tipton

Jeff Waddington spoke about Van Til and the archetype/ectype distinction during our 2017 Theology Conference VIP dinner at Market House on the Square in Lake Forest, Illinois.

Participants: Jeff Waddington

It is often assumed that The New Modernism (1946) is Van Til’s first published writing in which he evaluates Barth’s thought. Actually Van Til first published about Barth in a Christianity Today book review in 1931.[1] That was just two years after the opening of Westminster Seminary, and five years before the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. It is also the year before Barth published the first part of his Kirchliche Dogmatik. As such it is a very early insight into how Van Til was evaluating Barth’s theology, albeit through the eyes of the author of the book he was reviewing. Van Til does not delay in delivering punches. After one sentence commending the book he is reviewing he says, “Karl Barth’s theology is based upon an antitheistic theory of reality.” That is a position he will hold for the rest of his career as a critic of Barth’s theology. Now, to be sure, that does not sound very charitable. In fact, it sounds kind of harsh, even brash. But what drives Van Til to this conclusion? Is he just an ill-tempered man? Does he revel in criticism? Or, does he have a legitimate point in view? Let’s begin with taking a deep breath, and looking carefully at what Van Til is saying. First, notice that Van Til is not attacking the man here. He does not say Barth, himself, is antitheistic. Nor, interestingly enough, does he say that Barth’s theology, itself, is antitheistic (though he will come to that conclusion elsewhere). What he is saying is that Barth’s theology rests upon a foundational “theory of reality” that is itself antitheistic. But what is that “theory of reality?” Van Til’s next two sentences are: “Barth has made God and man to be correlatives of one another. Barth has no genuine transcendence theory.” What does it mean to say that God and man are “correlatives” of one another? It means what James Dolezal, for example, calls “theistic mutualism.”[2] In other words, for Barth God has no being or identity apart from the man Jesus Christ. This, in effect, eternalizes man. It makes humanity – in the man Jesus – of equal and ultimate origin with God (i.e., eternal). But if God and man are both eternal, there is an ontological interdependence between. This is what Van Til means by “correlatives.” It is this “correlative theory of reality” which stands at the basis of Barth’s theology, and which Van Til finds to be antitheistic. And it is antitheistic precisely here: a correlative relationship between God and man relativizes God, rendering God somehow dependent upon the creature. Such a god cannot, in any meaningful way, be said to be absolute sovereign Lord over the creature. Despite everything that Barth says about God’s lordship elsewhere, this view makes God and humanity (in the humanity of Christ) co-equal. Such a god cannot be omnipotent and self-sufficient, but must take his place in and among the creation. That makes such a god no different than the gods of mythology. And such a god is antithetical to true Christian theism. Now, more can be said about this article, and we’ll say more in the weeks to come. But it is important for us to at least get this down pat before moving on and trying to understand the rest of Van Til’s critique.

[1] Christianity Today 1/10 (Feb 1931): 13–14. The book reviewed is Alvin S. Zerbe, The Karl Barth Theology: The New Transcendentalism (Cleveland: Central Publishing House, 1930). [2] See his volume, All That is God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2017).

Our resident book hound, Ryan Noha, speaks about several rare books to be added to the Reformed Forum online store.

Select Titles:

• Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology (signed by the author)
• John Murray, Divorce (first edition, 1953)
• Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (first edition, 1955)
• Geerhardus Vos, The Mosaic Origin of the Pentateuchal Code (first edition, 1886)

Participants: Camden Bucey, Ryan Noha

It is this conception of the ultimacy of time and of pure factuality on which modern philosophy, particularly since the days of Kant, has laid such great stress. And it is because of the general recognition of the ultimacy of chance that rationalism of the sort that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz represented, is out of date. It has become customary to speak of post-Kantian philosophy as irrationalistic. It has been said that Kant limited reason so as to make room for faith. … In the first place the irrationalism of our day is the direct lineal descendent of the rationalism of previous days. The idea of pure chance has been inherent in every form of non-Christian thought in the past. It is the only logical alternative to the position of Christianity according to which the plan of God is back of all. (Christian Apologetics, 163-64).

It is often assumed that Kant provides a kind of Copernican revolution in the history of philosophy, overturning every Scholastic table that came before him. But Van Til does not see it that way. Kantian irrationalism is just another form of rationalism. Kant and Descartes are not enemies, but rather twins struggling in the womb of mother rationalism. So, how then is irrationalism actually rationalism? Before we answer that, we first need to say more about what Van Til means by irrationalism understood in the tradition of Kant.[1] Another phrase we can use for this tradition is “critical thought” (hereafter CT). CT begins with a basic dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. The phenomenal realm is everything we can perceive with the senses. We can only know this realm through the categories of the mind. Therefore, there is a “contribution” that man makes to knowing objective reality. What he can know is only that which is phenomenal. The noumenal realm is, however, directly unknowable by man. It contains things which cannot be perceived – the things of faith (God, being, etc.). In his critique of pure reason Kant, as Van Til says above, limited reason to make room for faith. Man can reason only according to what he can know in the phenomenal realm. Faith then is for those things in the noumenal realm which cannot be known. It is with regard to the noumenal realm that Van Til speaks about irrationalism. Irrationalism does not mean that man does not use reason. Rather, irrationalism is the idea that there is a place (the noumenal realm) that reason cannot go. It is the realm of ineffable mystery. It is the realm of the unknown. The noumenal realm cannot be known, at least not directly.[2] This means that no source of ultimate authority can be accessed by us living in the here and now. The final arbiter of all truth is inaccessible to us. Now we can begin to see how irrationalism is really just rationalism. If there is no access to the transcendent realm, then there is no direct knowledge of God or his revelation. That means that man along with his reason is completely on his own. He can speak about facts without any reference to an ultimate and final authority. In this way man is autonomous and is able to interpret reality quite apart from or without reference to God. Irrationalism “boxes out” the noumenal realm where transcendent truth is found. This allows fallen man to interpret reality according to his own sinful reason. Van Til gives a great illustration of this situation which is worth quoting at length here:

In the second place modern irrationalism has not in the least encroached upon the domain of the intellect as the natural man thinks of it. Irrationalism has merely taken possession of that which the intellect, by its own admission, cannot in any case control. Irrationalism has a secret treaty with rationalism by which the former cedes to the latter so much of its territory as the latter can at any given time find the forces to control. Kant’s realm of the noumenal has, as it were, agreed to yield so much of its area to the phenomenal, as the intellect by its newest weapons can manage to keep in control. Moreover, by the same treaty irrationalism has promised to keep out of its own territory any form of authority that might be objectionable to the autonomous intellect. The very idea of pure factuality or chance is the best guarantee that no true authority, such as that of God as the Creator and Judge of men, will ever confront man. If we compare the realm of the phenomenal as it has been ordered by the autonomous intellect to a clearing in a large forest we may compare the realm of the noumenal to that part of the same forest which has not yet been laid under contribution by the intellect. The realm of mystery is on this basis simply the realm of that which is not yet known. And the service of irrationalism to rationalism may be compared to that of some bold huntsman in the woods who keeps all lions and tigers away from the clearing. This bold huntsman covers the whole of the infinitely extended forest ever keeping away all danger from the clearing. This irrationalistic Robin Hood is so much of a rationalist that he virtually makes a universal negative statement about what can happen in all future time. In the secret treaty spoken of he has assured the intellect of the autonomous man that the God of Christianity cannot possibly exist and that no man therefore need to fear the coming of a judgment. If the whole course of history is, at least in part, controlled by chance, then there is no danger that the autonomous man will ever meet with the claims of authority as the Protestant believes in it. For the notion of authority is but the expression of the idea that God by his counsel controls all things that happen in the course of history. (Christian Apologetics, 164-65).

In short, irrationalism (or pushing all forms of ultimately authority, i.e., God, into an unknowable realm) serves rationalism by pleading ignorance (“makes a universal negative statement “) about time. It knows nothing about the meaning of history (because it does not know God whose plan stands back of history) nor does it know what the future holds (because it knows no God and his plan back of the future). The true meaning and significance of time (whether past or future) is inaccessible to man. Therefore time (whether past or future) only has the meaning that autonomous man would assign to it. That is to give to man’s mind a quasi-divine status, thus breaking down the distinction between the Creator and creature. And that is the heart and soul of rationalism.

[1] Before we get to that, it is necessary to briefly acknowledge that the interpretation of Kant is quite variegated. I am no Kant scholar, and neither was Van Til. So, here I recognize that what I am about to say can legitimately be quibbled with by Kant scholars who would argue on the lines of a different school of interpretation. Our purpose here, however, is not to enter those debates but simply to explain what Van Til understood by modern thought after Kant. [2] The noumenal realm if it is to be known can be known only indirectly. That is, by way of deduction from what can be known.

Last week we talked about Barth’s “absolutely other” god. There we noted how Barth begins with an unknown and unknowable god. In other words, he begins with the god of modernism. But, as we also noted, he does not stop there. For Barth God makes himself known, and he does so through revelation. Revelation is found neither in “the things that have been made” nor in Scripture. Rather, revelation is act of God in Jesus Christ alone. Jesus Christ is himself the only revelation of God. And in Jesus Christ God is wholly revealed. Herein lies Barth’s dialectical method. God is at once both absolutely other and wholly revealed. Van Til notes:

On the other hand when the god of Barth does reveal himself he reveals himself wholly. For Barth God is exhaustively known if he is known at all. That is to say to the extent that this god is known he is nothing distinct from the principles that are operative in the universe. He is then wholly identical with man and his world. It appears then that when the god of Barth is wholly mysterious and as such should manifest himself by revelation only, he remains wholly mysterious and does not reveal himself. On the other hand when this god does reveal himself his revelation is identical with what man can know apart from such a revelation. (Christian Apologetics, 171)

In short, if God reveals himself wholly, then what man knows is not God but only “man and his world.” A God who is wholly given over and identified with creation cannot be known. He is as much hidden in his revelation as he is as “absolutely other.” Some more clarification is in order. Van Til here leaves some important things unsaid which would illuminate his point had he included them here (he does, however, makes these points elsewhere). First, for Barth God’s revelation only takes place in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not a medium of revelation – he is revelation. In Christ God is at the same time wholly revealed and wholly concealed. Jesus Christ is the dialectical relation between God’s act of veiling and unveiling. He is both simultaneously. Second, Barth is known for having said “God is Jesus Christ.” That is quite different, note, then saying “Jesus Christ is God.” In the former expression Barth is identifying God with Jesus Christ such that the incarnation becomes a dialectical relation between God and man – which is quite different than traditional Chalcedonian Christology. In Barth’s theology God then is wholly identified with Jesus Christ. In orthodox Christianity we would say the finite (humanity of Christ) cannot contain the infinite (divine nature). But for Barth God exhaustively reveals himself – in fact, gives himself over – in and by the God-man Jesus Christ. Third, if God’s revelation of himself is found only in Jesus Christ and not in nature and not in Scripture, that leaves man with a knowledge that is disconnected from revelation. And knowledge which is disconnected from revelation is, according to Van Til, autonomous and therefore rebellious knowledge – and thus no true knowledge at all. At the end of the day we are left with pure skepticism.

It is often said that Barth believed in a god who was “wholly other.” It’s an oft repeated phrase, but rarely understood. Van Til would say “absolutely other.” By that Van Til understood a modern conception of God. It was a modern assumption that if God exists he must exist quite separate and distinct from us. Van Til observes:

Sad to say, however, the “absolutely other” God of Barth is absolutely other only in the way that a sky-rocket is “absolutely other” to the mind of the child. Barth’s god has first been cast up into the heights by the projective activity of the would-be autonomous man. In all his thinking Barth is, in spite of his efforts to escape it, still controlled by some form of modern critical philosophy. And this means that the mind of man is always thought of as contributing something ultimate to all the information it has and receives. Accordingly the “absolutely other” god of Barth remains absolute just so long as he is absolutely unknown. In that case he is identical with the realm of mystery which the autonomous man admits of as existing beyond the reach of its thought. It then has no more content and significance than the vaguest conception of something indeterminate. There is no more meaning in the idea of God as Barth holds it than there was in the idea of the apeiron, the indefinite, of Anaximander the Greek philosopher. (Christian Apologetics, 170).

At first blush this may just look like Van Til’s own creator-creature distinction. But it is not. Why not? Simply put, while Barth begins with the qualitative difference between man and God, Van Til begins with the self-contained ontological Trinity. Barth begins with an unknown deity, Van Til begins with and presupposes the Triune God of Scripture. In other words, for Van Til there is never any place or any time that God is unknown. The Triune God of Scripture always and everywhere makes himself known in the things that have been made (Psalm 19; Romans 1). In summary, Barth begins with a god that is the product of the would-be autonomous modern man. To be sure Barth will speak about God making himself known in revelation. We will discuss that next week as we look at the paragraph following the one cited above. But suffice it to say for now, having begun with modern/critical assumptions about the unknowability of God is there any hope that Barth can produce anything other than a modern/critical understanding of the knowability of God in revelation? Barth will try to give a Christian answer on the basis of dialectical reasoning. But, as Van Til will go on to show, Barth fails to escape the web of modern criticism, which is a web of his own making.

In chapter 3 of Christian Apologetics Van Til addresses the issue of the “point of contact” (Anknüpfungspunkt). That is to say, the point at which the believer may make contact with the unbeliever in the task of defending the faith. Is there a place of agreement between believer and unbeliever from which the apologetic endeavor may begin?

In this chapter Van Til offers an acute criticism of Old Princeton on this issue. He likens the Old Princeton understanding of reason, and the mode of apologetics that flows from it, to Rome and Arminianism. He makes this connection under the sub-heading “Less Consistent Calvinism” (pp. 101ff).

It may help here to underscore what Van Til is not saying in this section. He is not attacking Hodge’s or Warfield’s (hereafter: H&W) theology or their epistemology, as such. This is evident in part by a section (pp. 94–97) in which he offers quote after quote from Hodge on his doctrine of the incapacity of the natural man to know God. He also offers a quote from Warfield to the same effect (pp. 101-102). To be clear, Van Til is not saying that H&W hold to an Arminian theology. Rather, what he is doing is pointing up an inconsistency between the Old Princeton theology (which he praises) and the Old Princeton apologetic (which he criticizes as being Arminian). In short, the criticism concerns what he perceives to be an inconsistency and incongruity between their theology and apologetic.

To narrow the focus of the criticism, the reason why Van Til charges H&W’s apologetic with Arminianism is because of how they relate reason to revelation. After a section where he praises H&W for their very Calvinian doctrine of man’s knowledge of God, Van Til turns to critique: “It would seem that we have dropped from this high plane to the level of evangelicalism when Hodge speaks of the office of reason in matters of religion” (p. 102). In other words, Hodge presents us with a way of relating reason to revelation that is more consistent with an Arminian view than a Calvinistic one. He goes on to explain:

First [Hodge] shows that reason is necessary as a tool for the reception of revelation. About this point there can be little cause for dispute. “Revelations cannot be made to brutes or to idiots.” Second, Hodge argues that “Reason must judge of the credibility of a revelation.” . . . Third, Hodge continues, “Reason must judge of the evidences of a revelation.” As “faith involves assent, and assent is conviction produced by evidence, it follows that faith without evidence is either irrational or impossible.” (pp. 102-103)

Van Til does not disagree with all that Hodge says here (evidenced in his comment in the first point). But Van Til does take exception to the idea of reason being a judge of revelation’s credibility and evidences. Therefore, the believer may not assume reason’s competency to judge revelation:

But the unbeliever does not accept the doctrine of his creation in the image of God. It is therefore impossible to appeal to the intellectual and moral nature of men, as men themselves interpret this nature, and say that it must judge of the credibility and evidence of revelation. For if this is done, we are virtually telling the natural man to accept just so much and no more of Christianity as, with his perverted concept of human nature, he cares to accept. (pp. 103-104)

Van Til’s point is simple: because the unbeliever does not accept the fact that he is created in the image of God, he is in no position to rightly interpret the evidence of revelation. What is worse, we are allowing the unbeliever to be the final judge over revelation, which means he will accept only what he wants to accept – and nothing more. If we allow him to use his own fallen reason the unbeliever “will certainly assume the position of judge with respect to the credibility and evidence of revelation, but he will also certainly find the Christian religion incredible because impossible and the evidence for it always inadequate” (p. 104).

Now, this is where it gets interesting. Van Til actually concedes that H&W believe this:

Hodge’s own teaching on the blindness and hardness of the natural man corroborates this fact. To attribute to the natural man the right to judge by means of his reason of what is possible or impossible, or to judge by means of his moral nature of what is good or evil, is virtually to deny the “particularism” which, as Hodge no less than Warfield, believes to be the very hall-mark of a truly biblical theology. (ibid.)

So, where is the rub? It is precisely here:

The main difficulty with the position of Hodge on this matter of the point of contact, then, is that it does not clearly distinguish between the original and the fallen nature of man. Basically, of course, it is Hodge’s intention to appeal to the original nature of man as it came forth from the hands of its creator. But he frequently argues as though that original nature can still be found as active in the “common consciousness” of men. (p. 105)

And then finally:

Now it is quite in accord with the genius of Hodge’s theology to appeal to the “old man” in the sinner and altogether out of accord with his theology to appeal to the “new man” in the sinner as though he would form a basically proper judgment on any question. Yet Hodge has failed to distinguish clearly between these two. Accordingly he does not clearly distinguish the Reformed from the evangelical and Roman Catholic views of the point of contact. (pp. 105-106)

In summary, Van Til is not lambasting the Old Princeton theology here. He is not even lambasting the Old Princeton epistemology. What he is critical of, however, is how H&W’s inconsistency in their apologetic approach and the question of a point of contact. On the theoretical level H&W are spot on about man’s fallen nature and the need for regeneration and special revelation to properly interpret all things. But, they fall to inconsistency in that they fail to apply their doctrine of man and sin appropriately to the post-fall use of reason. In short, the apologete cannot assume a “common consciousness” between believer and unbeliever.

H&W’s theology was so faithfully Calvinistic that we should be baffled over why they switch to an Arminian apologetic. At the same time, however, we should not think that Van Til is calling H&W Arminian. He is not. He is not even saying that they contained within their thinking a mixture of Calvinism and Arminianism. Van Til’s critique is not of their theology, nor of their epistemology (see my past post “No Critic of Old Princeton?”). The criticism is exclusively on the level of application; that is, the failure to consistently apply their (good) theology to their (inconsistent) apologetic.

Both Van Til and Barth rejected all forms of bare theism. That is, they denied a generic view of God. Both believed this “god” was an idol. This is the god of human autonomy and philosophy. It comes from an apologetic approach which seeks to first prove or show that there is “a god” before it seeks to prove that this god is in fact the Triune God of Christianity. The blame for this approach may, arguably, be placed at the feet of Thomas Aquinas who first seeks to prove “an unmoved mover” on the ground of reason before he moves to talk about the Trinity from divine revelation. The impression left is that there is validity to speaking about God in any other way than the Triune God of Scripture. Van Til says this about that idea:

It is accordingly no easier for sinners to accept God’s revelation in nature than to accept God’s revelation in Scripture. They are no more ready of themselves to do the one than to do the other. From the point of view of the sinner, theism is as objectionable as is Christianity. Theism that is worthy of the name is Christian theism. Christ said that no man can come to the Father but by him. No one can become a theist unless he becomes a Christian. Any god that is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not God but an idol. (Christian Apologetics, 79)

For Van Til the God of creation is the Triune God. The God of the Old Testament is also the Triune God. That unbelievers or the saints of the Old Testament do not articulate a Nicean doctrine of the Trinity does not mean that God is anything else or anything other than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the one God who is at the same time three persons. The God who reveals himself in both nature and Scripture is the one Triune God. Van Til and Barth share a common anti-Scholasticism at this point. But, unfortunately, here the commonality ends. As we mentioned in an earlier post, Barth’s ontological starting part is actualism. That is, things are understand properly only by way of their acts and relations. So, for instance, there is no eternal Logos (i.e., the Word of John 1:1) who stands behind or apart from Jesus Christ as the Logos come in human flesh. So when he says the only God who is is the Christian God he is not affirming what Van Til is affirming. For Van Til the Triune God has always existed, even quite prior to and independent of the incarnation. What is more, the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – existed eternally and happily even prior to and independent of his decision to create and redeem by becoming the God-man in Jesus Christ. But for Barth the Triune God is who he is precisely because and only insomuch as he is the God who from all eternity has acted by way of a sovereign and free decision to become Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in and by Jesus Christ. To put it in very simple terms, for Barth God is dependent on creation (even the humanity of the incarnate Logos) to be (more accurately: to eternally become) a Trinity.[1] However, for Van Til the God of the Scriptures is “the self-contained ontological Trinity.” (see, for example, Christian Apologetics, p. 97). In other words, for Barth God’s act of grace toward his creatures in Christ becomes the constituting event which renders God as Trinity. For Van Til God does not need to be constituted as Trinity, for he is always and everywhere Trinity, and as Trinity the sovereign Lord over creation. Unfortunately, the logical conclusion to Barth’s approach is that creation is sovereign over his god. And that god is no Christian God. But for Van Til the Triune God is the Christian God—and the only God—precisely because he is not dependent on creation for his being or identity. If there never was a fall, there would be no incarnation. And still God would be Trinity. Perhaps the irony is that, according to Van Til, the Triune God does not need the incarnate Christ in order to be the Christian God. To say otherwise is to make God dependent on the creature. And a dependent God can in no way be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

[1] I understand that whether or not, or to what extent, God’s act of electing grace in Christ constitutes his being as Triune is hotly debated among Barth scholars. I do not intend to engage that discussion here. I make this statement without prejudice to the current debate. I am simply speaking from within the context of how Van Til himself reads Barth.

Jim Cassidy and Camden Bucey discuss theological methodology in light of Calvin’s view of natural theology. As a starting point for the discussion, they turn to Thiago M. Silva’s article, “John Calvin and the Limits of Natural Theology,” Puritan Reformed Journal 8, 2 (2016): 33-48.

Participants: Camden Bucey, Jim Cassidy

Now we begin to make a definite turn toward Barth in Van Til’s writing. Thus far this blog series has been a smattering of topics arising from my rereading of Van Til. But the purpose of my research is to get to the heart of Van Til’s critique of Karl Barth. Did Van Til have a legitimate beef with the Swiss theologian, or was it all much ado about nothing? Before we get into some detail about Van Til’s critique of Barth it may be helpful to spend a blog post here talking about his method. How does Van Til approach Barth as he seeks to understand, analyze and criticize his thought? Van Til’s critique is unique among all critics of Barth’s theology. Most critics take issue with this doctrine or that doctrine. Evangelicals debated whether or not Barth affirms a historical resurrection. Others draw the line at his denial of inerrancy. Berkouwer was critical of the fact that Barth’s soteriology functionally denies a real transition of sinners from wrath to grace. Whatever you may think of these criticism, and Van Til was in agreement with them, they were only surface attacks. For Van Til his deepest concerns about Barth were not over this doctrine or that doctrine, but over his system as a whole. To attack Barth at the level of specific doctrinal formulations is to go after the symptoms, not the disease itself. Van Til wanted to go after the disease and get to its source. This is not only how Van Til approached Barth, but all forms of unbelief. He asked the question: what are the fundamental preconditions standing behind a system of thought which lead to its conclusions? Such a method seeks to also show that, given those pre-conditions, the system under review leads to irreconcilable contradictions which eventually destroy the system as a whole. The identity of those preconditions and drawing them out “by good and necessary consequence” to their logical conclusion is what we mean when by “transcendental critique.” Because of its Kantian baggage the term has its limitations. But those limitations can be easily lifted if we gut the lingo of its Kantian background and instill it with biblical and Reformed content. We will look at examples of how Van Til applies his transcendental critique to Barth in future posts. But for now I would like to briefly address a common critique of Van Til’s reading and analysis of Barth’s theology. It is often said that Van Til draws conclusions about Barth’s theology which Barth himself expressly denies. A quick example, an example we will be unable to unpack here, is the idea of God’s antecedent being. In short, antecedence means God’s self-contained being which stands back of his actions in creation and time. Van Til said that Barth’s system denies an antecedent God who stands back of creation and his acts in it. Barth, however, speaks very clearly about God’s antecedence. So, is Van Til being uncharitable toward Barth, imposing a belief on him that he did not hold to? Another example would be the charge of universalism. Barth expressly denies that he affirms universalism. Van Til, nevertheless, charges him with it. Is this an unfair critique? Van Til’s transcendental method helps to explain why he persists in pressing his charges even though he knows full well Barth’s denials. For Van Til, despite Barth’s affirmations to the contrary, he cannot possibly hold to that affirmation given his ontological presuppositions. Barth believes in the qualitative difference between God and the creature, very much in a modern kind of way. That means that the only way one can speak about God’s interface with creation is through act. Therefore, God is known to be who he is only in and by his act of grace in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ himself, for Barth, gives God the “form” he has. There is, therefore, no God back of Jesus Christ who is not himself identified with Jesus Christ. It is a clear and easy process of reasoning to conclude that there is no antecedent being of God in any commonly understood sense of the word. Van Til’s method points up something very important for us to understand about reading theologians. We must not read them in a strict, literalistic way. We know how dangerous that approach to reading the Bible can be. The Westminster divines were wise when they spoke about things expressly stated in the Scripture and that which can be deduced “by good and necessary consequence” (WCF 1.6). That’s a great principle of interpretation, not just for the Bible but also for reading theologians. Van Til refused to read Barth simplistically. He dug down deep into his system, to the roots of his thought. And he was able to consistently trace out the threads of Barth’s thinking to their logical conclusions. Barth doesn’t get to just deny those conclusions and walk away. He is obligated to either admit there is an inconsistency in his system, or go back and revise his pre-theoretical commitments. Barth did neither, and that is why Van Til’s critique must still be pressed today.

Van Til used the word “scholasticism” (or its other variations) as shorthand for Thomistic dualism (and with it the medieval synthesis of Christian and pagan thought). In short Thomistic dualism is the idea that there are two sources of knowledge: reason and revelation. Knowledge that comes from reason can be gained by man on reason’s own terms, quite independent of revelation. I am aware that this understanding of Thomas is disputed. But that dispute need not distract us here. However, for our purposes, when Van Til criticizes “scholasticism” he is attacking Thomistic epistemology, as he understands it. So, for example:

But the essentially scholastic or Romanist procedure on the matter of the application of some abstract system of logic to the facts of experience is followed even by some Reformed theologians. This is done particularly in the field of apologetics. We therefore touch on the matter very briefly here. (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 301) Perhaps we can clarify this whole matter by contrasting the scholastic procedure, with respect to finding knowledge of God, to that which we have here advocated as being the consistently Christian procedure. To do this, we may conveniently turn to the work of a modern Catholic philosopher. We take the work of P. Coffey on Ontology, in order to see what he says with respect to the being-of God. We quote a portion of his chapter, “Being and Its Primary Determinations.” (ibid, 328) Scholastic theology indulged its speculative tendency when it spoke of a lumen gloriae by which man is supposed to be lifted out of his creatural limitations in the life hereafter in order that he may have a large measure of insight into the very being of God. (ibid, 370)

These are just three examples from one text of Van Til’s writings, but they are fairly representative. This means that Van Til was not against or critical of “scholasticism” as such. Scholasticism, rightly demonstrated by the Muller school, is primarily a method of organizing and presenting content. It need not necessarily carry with it particular content. So for example Thomas was a scholastic in that he organized his material in a systematic way and in a way that was intended to instruct and convince. Francis Turretin was a scholastic in this same way. Yet no one in their right mind would ever confuse Turretin for Thomas in terms of context. Turretin and Thomas both used a scholastic method, but their theology couldn’t be more different. What Van Til goes after are medieval theological systems which compromise Christianity with pagan thought. He does not go after “scholasticism” as such, much less Reformed scholasticism. For him to have done so would have been to bite the hand that feeds him. After all, no one influenced Van Til’s theology more than Vos and Bavinck. And Vos and Bavinck were very dependent upon Reformed scholasticism for their theological insights. They generally do not adopt the scholastic method, but they do adopt Reformed scholastic theological content. We may speak similarly about Old Princeton. Old Princeton feasted upon the meat of Francis Turretin’s great systematic theology Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Van Til received that theology from his professors at Princeton. As we have noted in a previous post Van Til disagreed with his professors’ apologetic, but not their theology. He believed that their apologetic was too influenced by a synthesis with modern thought which was reminiscent of Thomas’s synthesis with Aristotle. It is that synthesis which he often dubs “scholastic.” But it must be made clear that Van Til in no way rejected, but rather upheld, Reformed scholasticism (also called Reformed orthodoxy). Van Til often criticized other systems of thought over against Reformed scholasticism/Reformed orthodoxy. Reformed orthodoxy stood with Calvin’s thought over against Rome and Barthianism, so he can say: “There is less appreciation for Barth’s Christ as act in Calvin and in Reformed orthodoxy than there is in Romanism” (Christianity & Barthianism, 89). This is just one example among others. But the idea is finally and ultimately established by how Van Til uses the expression “Reformed orthodoxy” in his criticisms of Karl Barth. Where he quotes Barth and polemicizes against him (see for example footnote 25 in A Christian Theory of Knowledge, pp. 363-365) Barth uses the language of Reformed orthodoxy and Reformed scholasticism interchangeably to describe the same theological phenomenon, namely Reformed theology in the 17th century. It is the Reformed scholasticism of the 17th century that Barth attacks and which Van Til defends. Again, Van Til is not concerned to defend Reformed scholasticism’s method (Van Til himself did not use this method), but rather Reformed scholasticism’s theological content. What is the upshot of all this? Van Til should not be used by us today to reject “scholasticism” as such and with a sweeping wave of the hand. Nor should we blame Van Til for today’s depreciation of scholasticism. And what is more, perhaps, we should not think that “Calvin and the Calvinists” appropriated pagan sources the same way medieval scholastics did. Van Til was very critical of how the medievals synthesized Christianity and pagan thought, but did not see the same kind (or the same level) of synthesis among Calvin and Reformed orthodoxy. Van Til, after all, is dependent (albeit mediated by others) upon the theology of Reformed scholasticism, even as he is critical of medieval forms of scholasticism.

This post is a kind of follow-on from a previous post about “as-suchness.” In The New Synthesis Van Til writes:

Paul does not discuss questions of “fact” and views of “logic” as such. For Paul, there are no facts as such and there is no logic as such. Paul does not ask the Greeks to consider whether the facts might not be considered as probably or even possibly pointing toward the teleology of Scripture rather than to a teleology such as Plato and Aristotle offer. In effect, Paul asserts on the authority of Christ that no facts of the space-time world can exist and no logic can function except on the presupposition that whatever things the triune God of Scripture says are true.

Classical modes of defending the faith, in general, seek to prove the faith on the basis of some (as it is supposed) given standard of truth which is agreeable to both believer and unbeliever. Classical Apologists (hereafter, CA) say, “what does the unbeliever demand in order to believe? Whatever it is, I will give it to him.” So, some unbelievers demand “evidence” for the belief in God’s existence. They want “just facts” and no spin. CA are happy to oblige. Now, before we are critical of the CA, we have to acknowledge the good in their thinking. They believe that Christianity should be able to be defended by logic, facts, evidence, or history because the Christian’s God is the God of logic, history, evidence, and history. Christianity is a historical faith. It is based on facts. So, what is wrong with making a logical, historical, or evidential argument for the faith? Van Til is not opposed to logic, evidence or history. Nor is he opposed to using such in the service of defending the faith. What he opposes, however, is thinking that facts, logic, etc. are things which exist “out there,” brute facts that both believer and unbeliever can use together to evaluate truth claims about Christianity. But, for Van Til, to do that is to surrender the debate to the unbeliever at the outset. This mode of thinking makes facts, logic, etc. into abstractions. And Paul, says Van Til, does not argue from abstractions. The Bible knows nothing of “facts” which are independent of God and the meaning he gives them in his Word. But for CA abstractions become something akin to Platonic ideals which rule all of reality – from God to rocks. Furthermore, abstractions presuppose that both believer and unbeliever interpret them the same way. But they don’t. The unbeliever presupposes the Lordship of logic, facts, etc. over even God himself. The Christian, however, presupposes that God is the Lord over all things. And so the failure of the classical mode is at once apparent. CA adopt the presuppositions of the unbeliever – i.e., that logic, facts, etc. are interpreted the same way between believer and unbeliever. CA start with an unbelieving philosophy of fact, which allows the unbeliever to place God in the dock, imposing abstract notions of facts, logic, etc. upon God. But God is not the kind of person that can be placed in the dock. God is judge and jury. He is the arbiter. Therefore, we must begin with the triune God. Without the self-attesting Christ of Scripture there is no logic, fact, etc. The Christian must challenge the unbeliever’s philosophy of fact, not grant it to him. And it is precisely here – at this compromise – that CA find their failure.

There is still a great deal of confusion out there concerning the difference between orthodox Reformed theology and the theology of Karl Barth. Are they not the same? Is Barth not just advancing the ground work established by the Reformed branch of the Reformation? For Van Til the answer is a clear and resounding “no.” In fact, far from advancing the cause of the Reformed faith Karl Barth militates against it at every turn. The history of Barth critics among evangelicals and Reformed has shown that there is still very little clarity on why Reformed Theology and Barthian Theology are contrary to one another. It is an oft repeated opinion that Barth is not orthodox. But when asked “why not?” very few have a good answer. I hope to give a good answer here, with the help of Van Til. Allow me to quote two passages from The New Synthesis.  I will simply cite them here, and then unpack them on the other side:

However, Barth did all this not because he had any intention of restoring orthodoxy to the theology of the “blessed possessors” (beati possidentes). On the contrary, his “nein” to Brunner came about because, together with Romanists and Protestant consciousness theologians, Brunner had not completely cleansed his thinking of the left-overs of orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, and not merely that of the period’s Protestantism, but orthodoxy so far as it holds to the direct revelation of God in nature and in history, has been from beginning to end, Barth’s bete noir. He even observed remnants of a theology of possession in his own earliest major work, Romans, as also in the second one, Dogmatik 1(1927). Thus, when he opposed Brunner he was also, in effect, opposing his earlier works, in attempting to be self-critical in his criticism of others. Finally, Barth found himself in his book on Anselm and then, in 1932, commenced writing his Kirchliche Dogmatik on the principle of the Christ-Event alone. You have, he argued therein, a lie instead of the truth if you say as much as a single word about a God in himself. We know nothing about God unless this God be wholly revealed in and therefore wholly identical with Christ. And you also have a lie, instead of the truth, if you say as much as a single word about a man in himself. Historic as well as liberal Protestantism were thus guilty of speaking such lies. There is, to be sure, an absolute identification of God and man in Christ, but it is indirect. Jesus is God and the Bible is the Word of God but the “is” is, in both cases one of act not substance.

The first expression which helps us to understand Barth is “a theology of possession.” He rejects this kind of theology. For Barth, all classical modes of theology – including that found within liberalism – have the idea that the creature can possess or contain the Creator. In Thomas God was contained in the creation, whether in “being” or in the Mass. In Schleiermacher God was found in man’s feeling of absolute dependence. These are “theologies of possession” – theologies in which God reveals himself in, with, by and through the created order. Second, note the last sentence in the second quote, “one of act not substance.” In short, Barth’s theology is “actualistic.” God relates to the world only indirectly. He relates to the world only in and by a divine act. This act takes place not in, by, with or through the created order. Otherwise we would then have a “theology of possession.” Rather, God acts in, with, by and through God himself. God’s free act of grace is a transcendent event. It does not touch our world, but ever remains wholly other relative to it. So much more can and needs to be said about Barth’s theology. But this is it at its heart. Barth has an actualistic understanding of ontology. In theology we can only speak of God’s transcendent acts, but never his real entering into the created order. Contrary to this Reformed theology says that God – without losing any of his attributes, or without divinizing any part of the created order – condescends to his creation so that he is truly present in, with, by and through his ordained means. In this way, orthodox Reformed theology can truly say, without blushing, that the Bible is the Word of God. It is the Word of God come in a servant form. For Barth, revelation only takes place in a transcendent act of revelation in Jesus Christ. Therefore, the Bible cannot be said to be the revelation, even though it can be said to be the Word of God. But, as Van Til points out, it is the Word of God only in an actualistic sense. God reveals himself, but only indirectly (i.e., to and by himself, never to or by his creature). While Reformed ontology differs greatly from that of Thomas and Schleiermacher, it also differs greatly from Barth. Like the former, Reformed theology begins with a “substance” ontology – albeit it of a very different sort. And that is precisely where Reformed theology and Barth part ways, and it is at the very foundation of theology. Reformed theology cannot be maintained on the basis of an actualistic ontology. Therefore, Barth’s “Reformedness” can only be nominal. In summary, what is the difference between Barth’s theology and Reformed Theology? It is the difference between actualistic ontology and Reformed substance ontology. From Barth’s ontology comes the idea that God’s revelation is only and always indirect, and never given directly to us in nature or the Bible. Everything else gets unpacked from there.

The triumph of the eternal decree of God over history is just as much a problem as the triumph of history over the eternal decree. In an attempt to stave off Arminianism (a commendable task!) deniers of common grace have reasoned that God could in no way have any favor toward the reprobate. To say that God favors the reprobate is to introduce a contradiction between the eternal will of God and his works in history. God would be “two-faced.” He would will one thing, but then do another. Therefore, God is not gracious toward the reprobate nor does God genuinely desire for the reprobate to believe the Gospel and be saved. In this mode of theology, consideration of the eternal decree trumps how we are to understand God’s works in history. One of the prominent proponents of this position was Herman Hoeksema. Van Til has much to say against his denial of common grace, but central to his critique is the following:

Hoeksema never answered adequately the charge that on his view the elect can never in any sense have been under the wrath of God and Christ need not have died for them in history. Hoeksema took no note. (Common Grace and the Gospel, 251).

Van Til’s point is that if we identify God’s attitude toward man in time with God’s predestination then we can never speak about the elect as ever having been under divine wrath. Hoeksema’s unqualified supralapsarianism has its center in the proposition that what happens last in the order of history comes first in the order of the eternal decree.[1] This means that God chose the elect and the reprobate quite prior to his decree to create or ordain the fall. Each person’s eternal destination is determined apart from all the means that lead there onto. The means are swallowed up in and by the end. This means that the reprobate cannot have any favor with God. But – and this is Van Til’s point – the elect can never be said to ever have been under God’s wrath. In other words, the person who becomes a Christian later in life can in no meaningful way be said to have transitioned from being under God’s wrath to being under his grace. On the terms of Hoeksema’s supralapsarianism, the elect person was always under God’s favor, even as an unbeliever. This also means that when Adam fell there was no real transition from being in an estate of favor to an estate of wrath. What about the reprobate who were “in Adam” before the fall? Can we say, biblically, that the reprobate in Adam before the fall were under God’s wrath despite the fact that humanity was still innocent? Furthermore, when Christ came to die on the cross we cannot say that – relative to the elect – there was any real transition from an estate of wrath to an estate of grace. In fact, on Hoeksema’s presuppositions, there really was no need for Christ to come and atone for sins at all. Election is ultimate, and the elect were chosen quite irrespective of God’s decree to redeem in Christ. Christ and his work become somewhat of an unnecessary afterthought. And so what Hoeksema ends up doing is making history somewhat of a farce. Historical dynamics are not real manifestations of moving from grace to wrath or wrath to grace. God does not have any real interaction with even his elect. His elect can never be under his wrath before their conversion, nor can they come under God’s Fatherly displeasure after their conversion. Likewise, the reprobate can never experience the true and genuine favor of God, nor ever hear a true and sincere call to repent and be saved. God does not really desire the repentance of the wicked. So, how then are we to understand the relation between historical transitions and God’s eternal decree? Van Til proposes a Christian idea of “limiting concepts.” Limiting concepts, understood Christianly, has its basis in a Christian idea of mystery. In other words, there are things we simply do not know. In revelation, we are given knowledge of certain things, but not all things. God and his decree remain always incomprehensible to us. And where God’s revelation ends, there we must be content with mystery. God does reveal to us that he elects some unto eternal life and some unto eternal reprobation. God does reveal to us that he really and genuinely interacts with history, and that there are real transitions of covenant status among men. Now, how exactly those two truths relate is a mystery. But each (God’s eternal decree and real transitions in history) are truths God gives to limit our thinking from going to one extreme or the other. Unfortunately Hoeksema did not have his thinking limited by the truth of real transitions in history, and therefore fell into a form of rationalism by prejudicing God’s decree at the expense of history. Arminianism also falls into rationalism, by prejudicing history at the expense of God’s sovereign decree. Both have tried to pierce into mystery, and therefore they have surrendered one limiting concept for the sake of the other. And this is why Bavinck is absolutely correct when he says that mystery is the lifeblood of all true theology. Forsake mystery – and its correlate, “limiting concepts” – and rationalism is the inevitable result.

[1] See Herman Hoeksema, The Heidelberg Catechism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), 6:148; cf. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 241.

It is often assumed that Karl Barth’s thought is the antithesis of medieval scholasticism. It is true that Barth is exceedingly critical of Aquinas. But does Barth offer us a better theological program than that offered in Scholasticism? Van Til answers that question with a resounding no. For instance, in Common Grace and the Gospel Van Til says:

In the first place it means that we cannot join Karl Barth in reducing God as He is in Himself to a relation that He sustains to His people in the world. Barth virtually seeks to meet the objector’s charge that Christianity involves a basic contradiction by rejecting the idea of God as He is in Himself and of God’s counsel as controlling all things in the world. He says that Calvin’s doctrine of God’s counsel must be completely rejected. Only when it is rejected, is the grace of God permitted to flow freely upon mankind. And that means that God’s love envelops all men. To be sure, for Barth there is reprobation but it is reprobation in Christ. The final word of God for all men, says Barth, is Yes. It matters not that men have not heard of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. For Jesus of Nazareth is not, as such, the Christ. All men are as men, of necessity in Christ. All grace is universal or common grace. From the historic Christian point of view this is simply to say that the concept of grace is so widened as no longer to be grace at all. How truly Herman Bavinck anticipated, as it were, this most heretical of heresies of our day when he pointed out that in the last analysis one must make his choice between Pelagius and Augustine. The grace of God as Barth presents it is no longer distinguishable from the natural powers of man. All men to be men, says Barth, must have been saved and glorified from all eternity in Christ. This is how Barth would meet the objection against the idea of the sovereign grace of God. There is no longer any sovereign God and therefore there is no longer any grace. (pp. 154-155)

What Van Til says here takes some unpacking. I will do so in several points. First, Van Til notes Barth’s rejection of Calvin’s view of God’s eternal decree (cf. CD II.2, 67-76). Calvin affirms an absolutum decretum. This is the view that God, from eternity past, has elected some onto eternal life and some unto eternal damnation (i.e., double predestination). Barth believed that this was abstract theology, beginning as it does with an abstract decree of God-in-himself. Barth proposes instead a thoroughly Christological revamping of God’s decree. The idea is that Jesus Christ himself forms the two sides of election. In his humanity he is the elected man, and in his divinity he is the electing God (CD II.2, 76). And it is this relation-in-act which constitutes God’s being as it is. As he will later say, God’s “being is decision;” i.e., his decision to elect humanity in Christ’s humanity (CD II.2, 175). Second, this means that God’s grace is to and for all of humanity in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The humanity of Jesus Christ, in the eternal decision of election, is the vicarious humanity of all humans. In other words, because his humanity is the object of God’s electing grace and since his humanity represents all of humanity, that means all of humanity receives the electing grace of God. All humans are elect. God’s grace is – as Van Til says above – permitted to flow to all mankind. That means that God’s grace is universal. Or, we might say, common. It is given to all men, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves Christians. Grace is common to all – believer as well as unbeliever. Third, Van Til says that Barth’s position is that God’s being as well as man’s being is constituted by relation to one another. There is no abstract God, or God-in-himself. God’s being is a being-in-relation (to man). Likewise, man’s being is a being-in-relation (to God). This relation is found in Jesus Christ who is himself the relation between man (his humanity) and God (his divinity). Man’s being then is a being of grace. Humanity is elected man and therefore is “full of grace.” This applies not just to his status as elect, but to his very being. Van Til is troubled by this, in part, because if everything is grace then nothing is grace. If every man is a recipient of grace then grace has lost its meaning. Grace can be understood as grace only over against condemnation. And while Barth affirms Christ is both the elect man and reprobate man, yet no man is actually reprobate. All are elect. That turns what Calvin regarded as special grace into common grace. Common grace and the Gospel are confused in Barth. Fourth, as he said earlier, this makes Barth’s position almost indistinguishable from the analogia entis of Scholasticism. Van Til notes

For it is of the essence of the analogy of faith … that the ideas of God and man be thought of as correlative to one another. God is then nothing but what He is in relation to man through Christ, and man is nothing but what he is in relation to God through Christ. If the idea of correlativity between God and man was already involved in the analogy of being, it came to its full and final expression in the idea of the analogy of faith. (Common Grace, 130)

In other words, just as man and God are related to one another by the common idea of being (something the two share), so likewise with Barth’s view of analogy. God and man are related, they are as Van Til says elsewhere, “correlative” to one another in the eternal decision of God in election in Christ. For Thomas it was being that served as a common ontological notion which God and man have in common. For Barth it is God’s act of electing grace which holds them in common. But in either scenario God becomes dependent on something other than himself in his existence. God’s being as the electing God depends on his relation to man, just as man depends on his relation to God in Christ for his being. In God’s Time for Us I argue that this relation occurs in the “time” of God’s grace in Christ. This “time” serves as a substitute for a metaphysical notion of being. But whether we are talking about time or being, either way there is an ontological tertium quid which serves as an abstract ontological commonality relating God and man. Barth, no less than Thomas, fails to properly maintain the creator-creature distinction. And with that, he – no less than Thomas – fails to properly maintain the antithesis between believer and unbeliever (since grace is common to all). This gives the unbeliever a certain kind of autonomy and libertarian freedom to believe as he wants about God. Barth, in some ways, out-scholasticizes and out-rationalizes even Thomas himself! If nature is grace for Barth then all theology is natural theology, even while it is at the same time gracious theology. If Barth were consistent with his theology, then there really could be no Nein! to natural theology, but only a full and unequivocal yes and amen.

I am always edified when I read Van Til. I am also always challenged to conform my thinking to the Holy Scriptures and the Reformed faith. But I am not often surprised. That is a testament to the consistency of Van Til’s thought. But I was recently surprised by Van Til while reading Common Grace and the Gospel.  There he writes:

As for “Old Princeton Theology” in the booklet on Common Grace, I have scarcely referred to it. Elsewhere I have expressed disagreement with its apologetics. In this I was following Kuyper. But never have I expressed a basic difference with its theology or its basic epistemology. (p. 177)

In context Van Til is defending himself against a number of charges leveled against him by William Masselink. Masselink asserts that Van Til disagrees with Old Princeton (among others such as Kuyper, Hepp, etc.) on the matter of epistemology. And here Van Til retorts that while he does disagree with Old Princeton on apologetics, he does not disagree “with its theology or its basic epistemology.” This surprised me, in part, because I have always thought of Van Til’s criticism of Old Princeton as a criticism—first and foremost—of its epistemology. Of special interest here is what Van Til says about Warfield’s notion of “right reason” (for example in Defense of the Faith, 350). Is Van Til’s criticism against Warfield’s notion of how the unbeliever knows, or against his approach to the unbeliever apologetically? Or is it both? I won’t try to answer that question here. But, it seems to me, it is awfully difficult to separate out Warfield’s idea of “right reason” (which seems to be an epistemological issue) from his apologetic method. Is Van Til being completely consistent with himself here? Again, I raise the question not to answer it here. It seems the answer would be complex enough to warrant a longer study. Or, at the very least, it seems to warrant further discussion. Now it’s your turn. Thoughts?

Who says Van Til is impractical? I would argue that Van Til in all his writing always has an eye towards the church. All of his theologizing, all of his thoughts about apologetics, has a view toward the church and her ministry. A case in point is found in An Introduction to Systematic Theology:

It is sometimes contended that ministers need not be trained in systematic theology if only they know their Bibles. But “Bible-trained” instead of systematically trained preachers frequently preach error. … There are many “orthodox” preachers today whose study of Scripture has been so limited to what it says about soteriology that they could not protect the fold of God against heresies on the person of Christ. … If we carry this idea one step further, we note that a study of systematic theology will help men to preach theologically. It will help to make men proclaim the whole counsel of God. Many ministers never touch the greater part of the wealth of the revelation of God to man contained in Scripture. But systematics helps ministers to preach the whole counsel of God, and thus to make God central in their work. (pp. 22-23)

At first blush it may sound like that Van Til is prioritizing systematic theology over the Bible. There is nothing further from the truth. What Van Til is eschewing is the practice of myopic and atomistic handling of Scripture in the ministry. We might say that Van Til is saying that systematic theology properly done protects against reductionism. That is certainly what he has in view when he talks about orthodox preachers who limit their study of Scripture to soteriology. Such a practice can be found even today in the Reformed church. Sometimes everything gets boiled down to soteriology, or one aspect of soteriology like justification. Sometimes it all gets boiled down to counseling, or evangelism, or law, or what have you. Every sermon seems to be harping on one subject. Texts are picked out which teach only that subject matter. Or, worse still, texts are made to address those subjects no matter what they are really saying. Being trained as systematic theologians helps us to maintain balance in the ministry. With it we can be free to preach the whole counsel of God. We can maintain a balance between soteriology, the doctrine of God, the person and work of Christ, etc. Anyone who is a frequenter to this website knows how much of a premium we place on Biblical Theology. But Vos himself was quite clear how BT and ST should relate, even as they should be distinguished. The Reformed minister would do well to heed the concerns of both Vos and Van Til. If we do we will be better equipped to serve the health and well-being of the church. In closing, I leave the reader with this quote from Van Til later in the same volume:

It is not sufficient, then, to instruct the church in certain portions of Scripture, or to make them memorize a great deal of Scripture. In addition to this, they must possess a doctrine of Scripture as a whole. It is only if men see clearly that Scripture is what the orthodox doctrine says it in that they will, by the grace of God, be safeguarded against every wind of doctrine that so easily besets us. Unfortunately many Fundamentalist ministers are, to a large extent, themselves to blame for this deflection of the membership of the churches into all manner of false doctrines. With all the good intentions that they have, they all too commonly teach Scripture in a piecemeal fashion. And, in particular, many of them occupy themselves to such an extent with the more obscure passages of Scripture that they cultivate in their hearers a wrong sense of proportion. It is not uncommon to find an ardent and well-meaning youth, of less than twenty, interested greatly in the details of the “signs of the times,” while he has no reasonable knowledge of the main doctrines of Scripture, to say nothing of the catechisms of the church, in which the system of doctrine of the Scripture is set forth. (p. 240)