Dr Greg Bahnsen - A Short Synopsis of Van Til: The Essence of Presuppositionalism Part 2 (Part 2)

I mean, this is essentially the deist approach. But does he have the right to ask the deist. If God's not involved in the world, then God's not telling us what he's like. Then it just seems like it's everybody's guesswork what God is like. Another question. Because you have to know what the contrary is to show its impossibility. Christianity. Right. Okay, let me get this on the tape. The first question is, why bother with knowing what our opponents say? Okay, because we're arguing from the impossibility of the contrary. Okay? We're not trying to point out the incoherent of their position. We're trying to point out that we're the only righteousness. Well, pardon me, I'm really not trying to be rude. I don't want to just jump in and interrupt you, but that's not what I've been saying. I mean, maybe that's what I should be saying and you want to argue that. But no, what I'm saying is we do want to show the incoherence of what the unbeliever says, and so we have to understand what the unbeliever says. When I say we must pursue. Well, excuse me, we must argue from the impossibility of the contrary. I mean, the impossibility of any position contrary to Christianity. So if I'm going to show that something that's contrary to Christianity is impossible, then I need to know something about it to show its impossibility. No, I think it is. Yeah. Now I also understand what informs or what motivates that kind of question or skepticism. So should we take a minute and do some analysis on this? Okay. Transcendental reasoning talks about what kind of worldview, what kind of preconditions. You must have to make sense not just of logic but also of science, of moral absolutes, human freedom, human dignity, and so forth. So I present the Christian worldview. First of all, I don't answer the fool according to his folly, lest I be like unto him. That's the other verse that's right there in Proverbs 26. Okay, so I present my Christian worldview in terms of which logical reasoning is called for. Scientific inference can be justified. Moral absolutes are recognized, on and on and on. So. So I presented one worldview in terms of which this debate makes sense. Now I turn around and I talk to the individual who's a Muslim or a Mormon or an atheist, whatever it may be, Deist, whatever it may be. And he offers a worldview that's set over against this. And so then I answer the fool according to his folly, I do an internal critique of his worldview, show that he isn't wise in his own conceit. And so it turns out that Christianity can make sense out of logic, science, morality, et cetera. You can't make sense of anything. So what I'm saying to the Muslim or to the atheist is all of your argumentation was assuming the truth of my worldview even while you tried to argue against my worldview. Dr. Van Til liked to use the illustration of a child who slaps his father's face. But he's only able to do that because he's sitting on his father's lap. So what I say at the end of encounter essentially is you were sitting on God's lap, all the while trying to slap his face. Your argument against the faith already assumed the faith. Now somebody says, wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe you've got the better of me in terms of this argument, Doctor. You've shown that my worldview doesn't provide the preconditions of intelligibility, but maybe somebody else's does. Now then, now that I have your attention now then. No, no, no. What I'm saying is if somebody else's worldview does, and the Christian worldview as one of its own internal claims says that only it provides the preconditions of intelligibility, follow me out. You're on the horns of a dilemma. Because if there is another worldview, then it turns out the Christian worldview doesn't provide the preconditions of intelligibility because it's internally flawed. That is it is mistaken in what it claims. So if there is another, it turns out it's the only one because now there isn't the Christian one. But if there isn't another one, then of course what the Christians claim then is true. So you either have a situation where Christianity is or it is not the precondition of intelligibility. It cannot in the nature of the case be just one of many. It must be the only one, if it is one at all. Now, we've already seen that it is one at all. It does provide the preconditions of intelligibility. And therefore, since it says it's the only way to God on and on and on from the own internal character of Christianity, you can eliminate the others. We are not left with the inductive task of refuting worldview A, then B, then C, then D, and down the line till we've hit every possible worldview. And now we can finally say I've disproven all the rest. So I'm the only one left standing. No, I can say I'm the only one left standing. And my bold claim is I'm the only one that can begin. Not me, but my worldview. Yeah, and I'm the only one that can stand. So when somebody says, well, you don't know that's true, I say, sure I do, because the ultimate authority, God's word, tells me so. Yeah, but I don't know that that's God's word. I say, oh yeah, you do know that. You know that's God's word. And when you try to argue against it, guess what? You'll undermine the preconditions of intelligibility, destroy logic, science, morality, etc. Etc. Or let me give it to you in a less sophisticated form. I'm talking about the internal demands of the Christian worldview as being self justifying. We can just put it this way to the unbeliever. You think this is another one great. Produced the last three weeks, having coffee with you every other day, disproving your worldview. Since you're willing to give that one up, tell me which one it should be. By the way, I've done a lot of witnessing and defending of the faith with people in practical situations and I have rarely found somebody who says, well, I guess mine's destroyed, but there might be another one. It has happened occasionally, but it's really rare. Most unbelievers believe that they've got the best available and if I've ruined it, I've ruined everything. I agree. And the demonstration comes from the fact that Christianity says it's the only one. And so if it is true, follow this out. If Christianity is true, it must therefore be the only one that is true. Yeah, okay, well you see, that's all I need to demonstrate now. Let him show that Christianity is not true. Give me an alternative. And that hasn't been possible. What most. When I say most again, I want to remind you not very many non Christians do this. But when the non Christian gets on the line that, well, maybe there is another one, what I have heard usually is, well, no one's found one yet, but maybe in the future we'll have it. And I'll say, well, but then all along, through all the years, is that to say no one knew anything? Oh no, people knew things. They say, well then how do you justify the claims to knowledge throughout all the years if we're still waiting for this worldview that's supposed to be the competitor with Christianity. So both apologetically and evangelistically, I think we have an answer to that. But it's satisfactory just to tell people, hey, when you've got something to put on the board to talk about, then we can talk. Other than that, what you're giving me is a faith commitment, a blind leap of faith that there's got to be an alternative because you don't want to submit to the Christian God right here. Right? Yeah. A common challenge to Christianity is the Bible has to be interpreted and there are all these different interpretations. So how can you make any claims based on the Bible? Well, the first thing that has to be pointed out is the logical error in that line of thinking, that because there are a lot of interpretations, then of course you can't justify your interpretation. Let me give you the analogy to that. I teach math, fifth grade math, okay. And I give this long homework assignment to my. To my students. They come back the next day and they bring me these papers. And on this one particularly difficult problem, I have all these different answers. And so what I tell the class is now following the reasoning here of this person. You've got all these different answers. So obviously there is no correct answer to this problem. No, it doesn't follow from the fact that there are disagreements that nobody can be right. Now, let's talk about interpretation. Let's take this a step further. Why are there all these different interpretations? Well, we're going to narrow this down and be a little simplistic, but basically you could say there are all these interpretations because the Bible has no meaning. It's a piece of literature, but it has no set meaning. The Bible is really just a wax nose and you can form it whatever way you want, push it this way, push it that way. It means whatever you want it to mean. Now, there's very little in human language that meets that description. It turns out even the vaguest and ambiguous poetry cannot be made to say just anything you want it to say. Now, I'm going to put on the shelf. Let me just say for those of you who are more advanced, deconstructionism as an approach to human language might present an intellectual case for there's no set meaning. But I'm not talking about something as sophisticated as that. And if you want my lecture on deconstructionism, the Van Till lecture back whenever available from Westminster Media or from Covenant Tape Ministry at war with the Word. But let's forget the deconstructionists. The guy in the street usually says, well, Baptists say this, Presbyterians say that, Lutherans say this, Methodists say that. How could anybody know? I'm going to say, well, either the Bible is just completely malleable. It doesn't have any meaning in and of itself, and that's why there's all these disagreements, or the Bible means something and people, some people are messing up and understanding it. If I have a car radio and I'm driving down the street and I start getting static on the car radio and I get real angry about this, I don't want to listen to static. I don't want, you know, these confused notes. I want clear notes. But the radio is not giving me clear notes. So I stop at a payphone along the highway and I call up the radio station and I say, what's wrong with you guys? You're sending out static instead of music. Now you all laugh because you know what the radio station is going to say, right? They're going to say, isn't it far more likely that your car radio is busted, that your radio is interfering, that you're getting the signal, but then you're messing it up. It is possible the radio station is sending out bad signals, but it's far more likely, since we're not getting all these complaints from everybody, that then it's your radio that's at fault. Now, God would have us to believe the reason Baptists and Presbyterians and Methodists and Lutherans are arguing with each other is not because there's something wrong with the radio station. The sender of the message is being very clear, but sin and selfishness and pride and all sorts of other sorts of things are causing static on the line. And that's the receiver's problem, not the sender's problem. So when people raise that as an argument against Christianity to say, no, wait a minute, within the Christian worldview, we have disagreements because we are sinners, not because God is mumbling right here. Okay, let's follow this up a bit further. The question says, yes, but you who are making this claim, you too are a broken radio. Okay, beyond this, I would say the Bible has a particular meaning that anyone who can understand human language can understand the meaning of the Bible, that although Christians have their infighting and their sins and so forth, that don't bring total uniformity at this point. Again, the Bible cannot be faulted for that. So when the unbeliever tells me this, by the way, I don't know that I've ever found an unbeliever who makes that Sort of claim who knows very much about the Bible in the first place. That's the sort of. People love to throw rocks at a distance, you know, stand out and say, well, I know there are Baptists, there are Presbyterians, there are Lutherans, so forth. So obviously the Bible's got to have some problems. So I usually put it right back into the laugh of the unbeliever. And I say, show me where the Bible is. Not clear. What is it you don't understand about the Bible? Because I would like to show you that it's not difficult, just from the standpoint of human language, not difficult to understand what the Bible is saying. When the Bible says Jesus was born at Bethlehem, here's what it means. There is a person whose name was Jesus, whose mother was in Bethlehem when she gave birth, and blah, blah. Hey, have any problem with that? No. The Bible also says that this, this person who was born was born of a virgin. Yeah. You know what that means, don't you? Mary didn't have sex with anybody, but she had a baby. Now the person will say something like, well, I don't think that's possible. I say, okay, well, you don't believe that's possible, but you don't have any problem understanding the claim. It's clear. Somebody says, yeah, well, what about the work of Jesus? Well, you point to verses of the Bible where Jesus died on the cross as the substitute for the sin of men. Again, I don't really think that the Bible is unclear. And so I want to keep pushing the unbelievers. Show me the lack of clarity. Now, if he says that you're a broken radio and I say, well, I'm a broken radio, but by the grace of God and by the work of his spirit. A lot of the static's been taken out of my radio. I think I understand it pretty well. So if you're having difficulty, I'll be glad to explain it. Now, your alternative is either to listen to my explanation or to prove that I'm not interpreting it correctly. Now, if you're going to prove that I'm not interpreting it correctly, how is he going to do that? Oh, fatal move. He can only prove that I'm not interpreting it correctly by his interpreting it correctly and setting that against what I'm saying. But if he does that, then the Bible does have a message that is discernible. Again, we have a lot of cowardly argumentation from unbelievers. And this is one form of intellectual cowardice. Not to specify any problem with biblical interpretation, but Just to say it must be a problem. Well, I can give you another story. There is no problem with the Bible. There's a problem with the radio. And the guy says, okay, but you're a broken radio. I said, well, I was and I guess I still am to a certain degree, but I'd be glad to explain whatever you want to give to me. He says, oh, well, I don't have any specifics. And I say, oh, well, in other words, you just have a general dislike for the Bible. I want specifics. And that's really all you need to do to undermine that line of argumentation. If somebody says, yes, but how is it possible for any broken radio to get it right? I say, well, within the Christian story it's possible because God has corrected our thinking, enlightened our minds, etc, etc. So you either go with the unbeliever story about human thinking or you go with the Christian story. And on the Christian story there's no problem. Well, I know there are going to be more questions. We've probably gone a little longer than we should. Why don't we take about a 10 minute break. Let's just stretch your legs, get a drink of water, whatever, run out in the snow if you enjoy that sort of thing. And then when we come back, I'll give. We're not going to get done tonight, obviously, but I'll talk about the life of Van Till and then we'll take some more questions. As we continue our lecture, I want to move on to Roman numeral2 and try to cover before our time is up tonight, something of Van Till's career. This won't be as academic or theological as what we've been talking about, but those of you who study Van Till may be at least somewhat curious to know a little bit about his life and about the man himself. Van Till's consistent adherence to the authority and the supreme wisdom of God infallibly revealed in the Scriptures led him to develop a presuppositional method of apologetics which not only can forcefully communicate the intellectual challenge of the gospel and do so both to philosophy professors and to the milkman next door, but can also do it with humble boldness rather than the profane audacity that Calvin censured early in the lecture. As we began this evening, being steeped in biblical instruction and having mastered the intellectual giants of Western thought, Van Till brought to bear a conception and method of defending the faith which has, in light of the history of previous contributions, amounted to nothing less, I believe, than the reformation of Christian apologetics. I really think that Van Til has not because he was a man that I loved who had me on his porch with ginger ale and cookies many days when I was a seminarian, but a man who I think in the history of Christian thought has really revolutionized the field of apologetics. But he may not have seemed a very likely candidate for such an accomplishment. But then again, the Bible tells us God's in the habit of utilizing unlikely candidates to mount great victories for his kingdom. Just think of what God did with David when he faced cold. After all, Van Til wanted to be a farmer and instead he became one of the foremost Christian apologists of our times. To use the words of David Kukarsky, pardon me, in Christianity today. Cornelius Van Til, later nicknamed Keyes case, was born May 3rd, 1895 and Grootegast Holland. He was the sixth of eight children born to a devout dairy farmer who worshiped with the Reformed offshiding party. This is the party that had rejected presumptive regeneration of baptized children. At the age of 10 his family sailed to America and settled in the state of Indiana. Cornelius enjoyed the soil and animals, but it was obvious that he also advanced quickly in school and with his evident intellectual strengths he was not to be a farmer after all. In 1914 Europe went to war. Mantill went to Calvin Preparatory School and College which was the educational center of the Christian Reformed Church. He worked his way through Calvin as a part time janitor and wholly loved the study of philosophy for which his mind was obviously adept. By the time he enrolled in Calvin Seminary in 1921, he was already familiar with the works of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bovik and had added the knowledge of he Hebrew, Greek and Latin to his Dutch and English. That's what he knew going into seminary. To tell you a little bit about the difference between those days and ours. He'd already mastered Kuyper and Bavinck and knew his Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Dutch and English. He studied systematic theology there under Louis Berkhoff and Christian philosophy under W.H. geliman. Now, American Christianity in the 1920s was reacting to the shockwaves of theological liberalism inspired by German higher criticism of the Bible and a Darwinian view of man. At that time, the man who stood head and shoulders above his peers in setting forth a Christianity worthy of scholarly defense was J. Gresham Machen of Princeton Theological Seminary. His forceful answer to one plank in the skeptical view of the New Testament entitled the Origin of Paul's Religion was published during Van Til's first year in seminary. American philosophy in the 1920s was interacting with various responses to Kant's critical philosophy. Absolute idealism, personalism, neorealism, Critical realism were all popular schools of philosophy in the 1920s. And American philosophy was also coming under the sway of naturalistic ideologies, pragmatism and positivism. Among the schools of noted academic stature was Princeton University whose philosophy department was headed by the Scottish personalist Alexander Allen Bowman. Bowman's dates are 1883 to 1936. For his middler year of seminary in 1922, Van Till made the difficult decision to transfer to Princeton where he could study simultaneously at the seminary and the university. Not bad. Those of you who are in your middle or year thinking you have a lot of time on your hands, try to pick up a philosophy degree while you're doing your seminary degree. That's what Van Till did during this time. He roomed with John J. Deward who was to become a lifelong friend of his. And he managed the student dining club and lived on the same floor at Princeton. And Alexander hall with Das Machen, who was busy publishing numerous apologetical studies, including his monumental Christianity and liberalism in 1923. Well, I tell you, that wouldn't be too bad, you know, to spend a year living on the same floor with Machen while he's publishing books of that kind of stature. Van Till, seminary advisor with caspar whisper Hodge Jr. Was a grandson of Charles Hodge and the successor of two B.B. warfield. Van Til profited from the solid biblical instruction of men like Hodge and Robert Dick Wilson, William Park Armstrong and Oswald T. Alice. But the professor who was closest to his heart at Princeton was Gerhardus Vos, the respected Dutch scholar who championed the method of biblical theology to the Reformed community in America. Vos exercised a significant influence upon Vantil's decision to give himself to the academic and ecclesiastical struggles through which Dr. Machen would go. When Dr. Voss later passed away in 1949, it was Van Til who preached his funeral sermon. Van Till won the prize winning student papers for both 1923 and 1924. In 1923 he wrote on evil and theodicy and in 1924 on the will and its theological relations. The seminary granted him a ThM in Systematic Theology in 1925, after which he married his longtime sweetheart Rena Klooster. At the university, Vantil's prowess in metaphysical analysis and the mastery of Hegel's philosophy had gained high praise from A.A. bowman who offered him then a graduate fellowship. In 1927 the university granted the Ph.D. in philosophy to him for a dissertation on God and the absolute. Men in the seminary at Princeton had been keeping an eye on Van Till's work. His first published piece at the time he was awarded his master's degree in theology, had been a review of Alfred Northwight book Religion in the Making. And if you look at that review, his first published piece, the salient lines of presuppositional approach were already clearly exhibited. A Van Till located his opponent's crucial presuppositions. B he criticized the autonomous attitude which arises from a failure to honor the Creator creature distinction. C he expressed exposes the internal and destructive philosophical tensions which attend theonomy. And then D he set forth the only viable alternative, biblical Christianity. I find that interesting. If you want to get into this, do read his first publication, this review, because again, in seed form, it's all there. Vanthill's next publication, in 1929, was a review of two works by Bovink. In it, another famous feature of Van Till's thinking came to expression as he insisted that the propagation and defense of the faith required believers to abandon the impossible notion of neutral territory, a neutral territory of truth between believers and unbelievers. By the time the review was published, Van Til was back at Princeton, now as a visiting lecturer. When J. Gresham Machen declined the chair of apologetics at Princeton Seminary and decided to remain in the New Testament department, the board of the seminary was encouraged by William Brenton Green, the retired professor of apologetics, to invite Van Til to lecture in the department for the 1928-1929 academic year. Following the reception of his doctorate and his first visit back to the Netherlands in 1927, Van Till had accepted the pastorate of the Christian Reformed Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, which is a rural community of about 1,000 people, 30 miles from Grand Rapids, or at that time it was about a thousand people. Although installed for only a year, he took a leave of absence from the congregation and taught apologetics at Princeton, impressing everyone so favorably, even though he was the youngest instructor at Princeton, that at the end of only one year, the board elected him to assume the Stewart Chair of Apologetics and Ethics. I mean, I don't know how much you know about these sorts of things, but I mean, that is remarkable. One year of instruction and he's offered the chair of apologetics, the Stewart Chair. However, within weeks, the General assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA reorganized Princeton Seminary in such a way that control of the once conservative bastion of Reformed orthodoxy was turned over to men who desired to see many different viewpoints represented at present Princeton and who favored a broad church. Machen resigned and immediately started work to establish Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Van Till likewise resigned and returned to Michigan. In the meantime, Machen hand picked Van Till to teach apologetics in the new seminary, even traveling with Ned B. Stonehouse to Michigan in August to plead for Van Til's acceptance of the position after he had received a previous visit from OT Alice and Alice had not secured his agreement to do it. Van Till declined even Machen's appeal at first, but after that he changed his mind and he took up teaching duties at Westminster Seminary in the fall of 1929, where he continued in that ministry until retiring more than 40 years later. When Machen was unjustly forced out of the Presbyterian church in the USA in 1936, Van Till supported him in the founding of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Along with RB Kuyper, he transferred his ministerial credential from the Christian Reformed Church to the new denomination, where he came to have a decided influence from years to come, both as a scholar and as a powerful pulpit preacher. From the outset of his teaching career, Van Till sought to develop a distinctively, consistently Christian philosophical outlook. He's wanted to see everything in terms of a biblical world and life view. That was evident already in 1931 when he published articles on a Christian Theistic theory of knowledge and a Christian Theistic theory of reality. These appeared in the Banner. The first major syllabus produced by Van Till at Westminster Seminary was entitled Metaphysics of Apologetics, and it appeared in 1933. It was subsequently retitled A Survey of Christian Epistemology, and I'm glad to say that the bookstore has copies of that in the bookstore. This last summer I did a three day intensive seminar on Van Til and people from around the country came in to study about 15 hours and one of the things that I wanted to impress upon my students, and I'll just mention in passing here, is that if you will study this first major syllabus by Van Til, first of all you'll see all of the presuppositional method laid out and on top of it an answer to just about every major criticism that has come down the pike since that time. And that I think is rather remarkable. The kinds of misrepresentations and attacks that Van Till suffered, especially from evangelical evidentialists, were already dealt with in the Survey of Christian Epistemology. So I really encourage people to pay attention to it. Granted, the middle section of it is hard going if you you're not a philosophy major. That in itself tells you something about the nature between. The nature of the difference, pardon me, between seminarians in the 1930s and in the 1990s. When people came to Westminster in the 1930s, they were expected to understand Plato and Kant and Dewey so that they could pick up a book like that and read it as a classroom syllabus. And now we have to plead and plead and plead. Oh please pick it up and work through it. But if you have a difficult time with that middle section, do read the first two or three chapters and the last two chapters because they will help you immensely in understanding Dan Tilb. Anyway, that was his first syllabus, 1933. In it he traced through history various epistemological positions, noting the bearing of metaphysical convictions upon them, and he advanced the necessity of a transcendental method of argumentation. You will notice in the syllabus that Dan Till insists that Christians must reason with unbelievers. He doesn't think that we're left with just testimony. He says we must reason with them, we must argue with them and seek to reduce the non Christian worldview, whatever form it takes, to absurdity. And we reduce it to absurdity by exposing it to be epistemologically and morally self contradictory. Mantill's insight, one, which is, I think, brilliant and apologetically powerful, was that anti theism actually presupposes theism. And Steve will know this with a little bit of humor. I tell my students that if someone ever wakes you up in the middle of the night in your grogginess and says tell me quickly what's Van Til all about? In three words I've got to know. You can do it. Anti theism presupposes theism. That is the essential insight of Antilles apologetic to reason at all. The unbeliever, the anti theist must already operate on a certain assumptions which contradict his espoused presuppositions, assumptions which comport only with the Christian worldview. So the argument of the antitheist presupposes the worldview of the theist. The unbelievers efforts to be rational and to find an intelligible interpretation of his experience are then indications that he bears a knowledge of God, the creature creator within his heart, though he's struggling to suppress it, as the Bible itself speaks of man's sinful condition. By the end of the decade Van Til had produced major classroom syllabi covering the topics of apologetics, evidences, prolegomena to systematic theology, psychology of religion, ethics and crisis theology. Think about that for a minute. Van Till had already put out a syllabus on crisis theology. By the end of the 1930s, well, of course evangelicals don't start getting suspicious and writing about this till the 1950s, he was really quite ahead of his time and quite aware of what was happening on the continent and its significance for us. In these syllabi, Van Till was particularly adamant that in defending the the faith believers must not artificially separate philosophical apologetics from empirical evidences, that is, separate the defense of theism in general from Christianity in particular. He was adamant the systematic theology, the positive statement of the truth, should not be artificially separated from apologetics the defense of the truth. These early syllabi have been expanded and revised and reissued many times over. For nearly half a century, Dantil's presuppositional approach to the defense of the faith has been a powerful impetus for reform in Christian thinking, one which cuts three directions outwardly, inwardly, widely, outwardly. It directs a transcendental challenge to all philosophies that fall short of a biblical theory of knowledge, demonstrating that their worldviews do not provide the philosophical preconditions needed for the intelligible use of logic science or ethics. In this light, Van Till has taken the offensive against unbelieving philosophy, and if you do a study of all of his publications, you'll notice he does an internal critique of Plato, Kant, Dewey, idealism, personalism, process philosophy, and on and on the list goes. Striving to stay abreast of the contemporary philosophical scene. Inwardly, Vantil's approach calls for self examination by Christian scholars and apologists to see if their own theories of knowledge have been self consciously developed in subordination to the word of God which they wish to vindicate or to apply. Not surprisingly, then, they anticipate. Till's career as a Christian scholar has led him into confrontation with a variety of defections from sound theology and a variety of defects in Christian philosophy, whether found first in schools of modern theology such as Barth and Bruner or Heidegger, Telliard, Buber, Peray, Tillich, Croner, the God Is Dead movement, the confession of 67, or the new Pardon Me, or the new hermeneutic of Fuchs and Abling first of all or secondly the American Presbyterian tradition. Mantill has done critical analyses of past stalwarts like Charles Hodge, B.B. warfield, and William Benton Green, as well as as more recent figures such as J. Oliver Boswell, Gordon Clark, Floyd Hamilton, and Edward J. Carnell. So he's dealt with defecting theologians, Bart Bruner and all the rest American Presbyterians. The list I've given you. And he's dealt with as well the issues and teachings of Dutch Reformed authors in the Netherlands and the United States. Issues like Common Grace. Dan Tilt spent a good deal of time on and he's analyzed writers like Kuyper, Bovink, Berkauer, Dord Vollenhoven and James Dane. Vanthill's prolific work as a teacher and writer goes beyond his constructive and his critical contributions in apologetics and Christian philosophy. His presuppositional outlook not only cuts outwardly and inwardly, it has likewise cut a wide swath through a large number of relevant areas of interest. Van Till has produced valuable studies in the area of Christian theology, touching on the equal ultimacy within the Trinity, absolute predestination, God's incomprehensibility, the relationship of nature and revelation, the issue of theological paradox and a non intellectualistic view of man. Van Till is written in the area of ethics, dealing with the necessity of the proper goal, the proper motive and the proper standard in ethics. Van Til has works that address intellectual history. He addresses key figures in church history such as Augustine and Calvin. He has works on Christian culture and finally the necessity of Christian education. I realize we're flying through a lot of this, believe it or not, with every one of those things in my notes I have pages of footnotes detailing where all those sorts of things can be found. The man was just monumental in the amount of material turned out and the wide variety of things that he addressed. And so the distinctive presuppositional method and outlook which Van Till has promoted throughout his published writings has the effect on you of an intellectual revolution, with its impact felt outwardly in the transcendental challenge to all unbelieving scholarship, inwardly in the requirement that Christian scholars be developed in a way faithful to its ultimate commitments and widely in its relevance for numerous areas of life and study by God's providence within the Christian world. Van Till himself as an individual exercised great personal influence. In 1938 he was appointed honorary professor at the University of Rebecca in Hungary, the oldest Reformed institution in Europe. Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia stranded Van Till in Amsterdam, by the way, preventing him from reaching Budapest to deliver his acceptance speech. Throughout Van Til's time at Westminster Seminary, numerous students from the Orient, especially Korea, Taiwan and Japan, have come to consolidate their understanding of the Reformed faith under his tutelage. Many well known Christian scholars and teachers in America also have studied with Van Til, including the popular apologists Edward J. Carnell and Francis Schaeffer. During his career, Van T. Till also dealt in a critical fashion with the apologist J. Oliver Buswell, an inductivist, and Gordon Clark, a deductivist, both of whom were at one time ministers in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. But in the mid-1930s, Boswell left that denomination, subsequently taking issue with Van Til's consistent Calvinism and his philosophical presupposition, transitionalism. In the 1940s, Clark became embroiled in ecclesiastical controversy over his views of God's incomprehensibility, the primacy of the intellect, and other matters. Eventually he left the denomination, being severely critical of Van Till's theory of knowledge. In the 1950s, Van Till was engaged in debating with certain Dutch authors over philosophical issues pertaining to common grace and to God's sovereignty. Van Til was invited to become the president of Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, but after being pulled back and forth in his mind, he determined to remain in his teaching post at Westminster. In 1955, he published what would become his most commonly read book for explaining his apologetical system, the Defense of the Faith. Please notice that the Defense of the Faith is a reworking and a compilation of many previous syllabi and articles which positively presented the presuppositional method and replied to various critics of it. I say that because, in a sense, that's not the best book to give to people as the first step of independence. Introducing Van Till's apologetic, you see, it is that kind of compilation and answer to critics. The best way to know Van Till is to go back to things he wrote previously and get started there, then kind of get on board with the Defense of the Faith to see how he dealt with his critics. The presuppositional perspective was spread further not only by translation of his works by students in many countries, but also through the Vanthill's personal trips. He went to the Orient in 1959, to Tokyo, Taipei, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Seoul, and then to the Yucatan province of Mexico in 1962. Those who came to know Dr. Van Til personally, I think, will testify that he was a man not only of principle and conviction, but equally a man of warmth and compassion. The warmth and compassion were clearly manifest in his humor that he used in his lectures, the fact that his home was always open to students and visitors wishing to talk with him. He persistently shared ginger ale and cookies with them on his porch, his street preaching in New York City, his tender letters of gospel hope to presidents of the United States and other public figures and his continuing walks and evangelistic talks with the nuns who lived behind his home. It was more than once that I drove over to spend some time with Dr. Van Til and had to wait for him to come back from his afternoon walks with the nuns behind his home as he was evangelizing them. Most people don't think that the kind of towering intellect, somebody like Van Till would have time for such mundane things, but that was the kind of man he was. Testimony to his principle and conviction is found in Van Till's reluctant but necessary critical call for greater faithfulness even in those who are perceived as his as closest to his position. In 1970, 1959, Herman Doyewaard was in America and lectured at Westminster Seminary. Although Van Till had been encouraged by Doyevaird's thought 30 years earlier when he met him in Amsterdam, Van Till was now distressed to see Doyevaird unwilling to base his philosophy on an exegesis of the textual teaching of Scripture, something that Dojevaird would later call scholastic rational. In Van Till, fidelity to the Reformation truth and the self attesting authority of Christ in Scripture meant that Van Till was unable to endorse his fellow Dutchman's approach. This parting of the ways was exacerbated in the decade of the 1960s by certain disciples of Dellua in North America, particularly the association for the Advancement of Christian Scholarship, which led to tension between the two schools of thought between Van Til and his colleague in the apologetics department at Westminster. In fact, Dr. Knudsen, on the other hand, during this period and following a number of younger students and teachers who had been nourished on Van Till's presuppositional approach began to become visible by publishing, teaching or making their own contribution to Christian scholarship. One can think here of present company excluded Grady Spires or R.J. rushdooney or John Frame. In the 1970s Van Till was presented with two volumes of essays honoring his achievement as a theologian and an apologist. The 1970s Jerusalem and Athens, edited by E.R. guillen, and then in 1976, Foundations for Christian Scholarship, edited by Gary North. In 1972 Dr. Van Til was granted Emeritus professor status at Westminster Theological seminary, and in 1976 the seminary named a new lecture hall in his honor, which we now sit in. Rena, his beloved wife of 50 years, passed away in January of 1978, and at that time a young family came to live with him in his old home in the Philadelphia suburb of Ambler. The last time I saw Dr. Van Til was June of 1985. And he was pushing one of the children of this young couple in a stroller. And singing gospel hymns to them. On April 17, 1987, Van Till, one of the towering Christian intellects of the 20th century, took his place in the choir of heaven. I wish I could tell you more about him. But I hope just this little survey gives you some sense. Not only of his intellectual stature, but the kind of man that he was. Let's take the remaining moments we have here to open the floor again now for more questions on Van Til and Van Till's approach. And if you can come back tomorrow night, I really hope you will. Then I will deal briefly with Van Til's relationship to Kuyper, Warfield, Doyvard and Schaeffer. And spend the majority of my time talking about theistic proof and evidences. Okay. Right there. Okay. The question is a request for a brief indication of the grounded disagreement between Clark and Van Til. First of all, that disagreement, I don't think, can historically be understood in the debate within the orthodox Presbyterian. First of, all, that disagreement, I don't think, can historically be understood in the debate within the orthodox Presbyterian Church. Without appreciation for the fact that more than philosophical and theological differences were at stake. There were personal and political tensions there. Just as one example, the opponents of Van Till, the followers of Clark, had already picked a shadow faculty to take over at Westminster Seminary. So, I mean, this was a much broader thing than just debating certain things. I'm not saying that that's what it reduces to. I mean, I'm not trying to give you just the psychological, political analysis of it. But I. I also want to make clear that when we look at what was going on historically. It can't be fully appreciated without seeing that historical context. Moreover, many people think that the Clark Van Til controversy. Was in some simple way over the incomprehensibility of God. But if you look at the documents and the complaints and that sort of thing. If you see what Van Till wrote about Clark, you see that he was equally exercised about what he thought was Clark's intellectualistic view of man. Or his anthropology that acceded to the primacy of the intellect, as it was called. I'd love to get into this because I have material developed on it. But see, Van Til doesn't think that what you should think about man is that he's essentially a rational creature. And then all the other things that go on, his emotional life, his volitional life. Are now tied to man's reason. Kind of like Plato's myth of the Chariot and so forth, where reason is the charioteer and so forth. Van Till thinks that that's an essentially Greek view of man. And so he didn't appreciate Clark's endorsing of that. And if anybody doubts that Clark did that sort of thing, go on to look at his subsequent works, which became more and more explicit, even to the. The point of Clark translating John 1:1 as in the beginning was the logic. So Van Till was very worried about this overly intellectualistic approach to man. But then also corresponding to that, the incomprehensibility of God in Clark's presentation, Van Till and followers of Van Till thought was the pedestrian way of putting it, though you get into a debate over how to interpret even this. The pedestrian way of putting it is they tried to make it a quantitative matter. The way in which God knows and how much God knows makes him incomprehensible. Whereas Van Till argued, no, there's something about God's knowledge which is above man's knowledge in a qualitative, not just a quantitative sense. Okay, so what happens in the debate then is that Van Til tries to. To explain that man doesn't know as God knows. There's a quality to God's knowing that man can never attain to. When I would be at Van Til's home, we talk about this. He liked to use very homey illustrations. And he would say, well, now, Greg, if I want to know how many socks are in my. In my dresser drawer upstairs, I have to go up the stairs, open the drawer and look in and do some research. Okay? But now God doesn't have have to do that to know how many socks are in the drawer. But it's more than just God can see through the closed drawer. It's that God's knowledge has made the situation what it is. God doesn't approach the world to learn about it. God's knowing makes the world the way it is. So that man's knowledge, even if he could see through the dresser drawer or something and is always infallible, would never be creative knowledge would never have that original quality of God's knowledge. Moreover, God's knowledge is criteriological. Whatever God knows is the standard for what anybody else knows. And even when I am right, I was saying to some of the students who came for a discussion yesterday in the bookstore, you know, even if Dr. Bahnsen were absolutely correct about what he saying on some subject, my knowledge would never be the standard of what is true. Okay? So there's this qualitative difference and then one that Van Till didn't talk about. But in my subsequent work and teaching, I like to emphasize I found it helpful is if you want to see the difference in quality between God's knowing and man's, think about this. I have an number of students that study with me and in some cases they're nice enough to have a high regard for Dr. Bahnsen. And some of them even amazingly stand in a little bit of awe of Dr. Bonson and say, boy, you know so much and so forth. But you know what happens? You take the student who at first starts with that kind of boy. Dr. Bonsen is just awesome. He knows so much and he's so helpful and all these nice flattering things. After they study with you for a while, those students start to know a good deal of what I know because I'm imparting that to them. And you know what? As they know more of what I know, that sense of distance and awe diminishes. And that's fine. By the way, I'm a real laid back Southern Californian and I don't particularly want my students adulating me. I like to be buddies and so forth. But the interesting thing is there's that dynamic as they know when they start knowing what I know, then the sense of awe diminishes. But you'll find in theology, the very opposite is true about the knowledge of God. As we come to know more of what God knows, the sense of awe does not diminish. It in fact increases. So that the people who most bow to the mystery and the wonder of what God knows are those who know him the most. So you see, there's the difference. God's knowledge has a quality that man's knowledge doesn't. Now, Van Til's point in the 1940s was that Gordon Clark's view, the primacy of the intellect and the incomprehensibility of God did not take full biblical account of these sorts of things. In order to explain his point of view, Van Till used the method of explanation. However, that I think was a strategic mistake. Vantil said, think of it as man knowing God. Analogously. That's okay, because to say that it's analogous is to say there's points of commonality and points of dissimilarity. That's what an analogy is. And Van Till would say there are things that are common in God's knowledge and man's knowledge. For instance, when God knows the rose in the garden and I know the rose in the garden, what we know is the same thing. The rose in the garden, the object of knowledge is the same. But Dantill would say, I don't know the rose. The way God knows I have to think his thoughts after him. So my thinking is always analogous to God's thinking. Now you can say that, and if there's goodwill in the classroom, no one should have any problem with that. But in the 1940s, there wasn't a lot of goodwill there. And the Clarkians wishing to jump on what Van Till said, ah, Van Till's saying we don't know God. We only know an analogy of God, and therefore we can't really know anything about God, in which case he's really neo orthodox and a skeptic. And they continue to say that people like John Robbins have written those sorts of things down and it's just utterly untrue. It's a pervasive verse misreading of what evangelists getting at. In the 1940s, John Murray said openly, what we know is God, not simply an analogy of God, but the way in which we know him is analogously. And yet you still have the Clarkians who say that sort of thing. So I'll just leave it at that. As far as hope, it gives you at least a beginning of understanding what went on there. Okay, right here. Very good. The question is, how do you deal with, say, a university student or any unbeliever who doesn't really have a very great concern to be consistent? You start pushing them and it turns out they really don't care that much about it. It's good to comment in this setting that there's a difference between persuasion and evangelism and upholding the truthfulness of Christianity, because it will turn out that your question comes down to this. If you want to argue to show the truthfulness of Christianity. What if you run into somebody who doesn't want to argue? Well, basically you don't have an apologetical situation here. You still have an evangelistic one. You still want the gospel to get through to the person. But this is not what you've asked. And don't take this wrong, but what you've asked is in a sense not really an apology apologetical question, because apologetics is presenting a reason for the hope that is in us. Now, there are some people who say, well, I don't want to reason about it, I don't care. So there's no apologetic called for. Let's see if I can do a little bit of apologetic. Even with this person who says he's not interested. Somebody tells me on a university campus, after I've shown the inconsistencies in his worldview, one that's real easy to see. When I was in college, in the days of the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War, you would sometimes run into people who would say, it's all right for me to live with my girlfriend out of wedlock. And I would point to the biblical standard of sexuality and so forth as a way of showing that this person is guilty before God, in need of a savior and so forth. But the comeback is, nah, you can't lay that on me. Because it's different strokes for different folks when it comes to sex. Everything's relative. But yet the same person who says this would often be adamant that it was immoral for the United States to be fighting in Vietnam. Well, you can imagine what I would do there in trying to show the inconsistency. And you can't say that it's different strokes for different folks and then turn around and say that it's morally, absolutely wrong for the United States to be in Vietnam. Now imagine that the person says, ah, well, okay, I don't care about consistency. When someone says that, I almost immediately shoot back, oh, well, then you do. The person will say, no, no, didn't you hear me? I said I don't care about consistency. And I'll say, well, if you don't, then you do. You know, if nothing else, you're provoking the person. They're not not going to walk away at that point. Can't you hear me? I said, I don't care about consistency. And I said, yeah, but if you don't care about consistency, then contradictions are acceptable to you because you don't care about consistency. But if contradictions are acceptable to you, then I can contradict you. And you have no comeback to that. So when you tell me that you don't care about consistency, I contradict you and say you do care about consistency. This is not just the child's, yes, I do. No, I don't. You know, that kind of thing back and forth. It's, I'm saying, you have just handed me all I need to refute what you've just said. So I am in a way doing an apologetical thing on his alleged indifference to consistency. So at that point, the person's either going to say, okay, I see, I've got to be consistent. I'm not able to be consistent. I don't have an answer. What am I going to do? And then, of course, the doors open. I give him the gospel, and we hope that he's converted. More likely the person says oh yeah, just one more little trick of logic and debate. I'm just not going to talk to you. I don't want to get into this so you can talk about how do you keep the guy on the line, how do you keep the door evangelistically open but apologetically? He's already done everything that he needs to to show that he's wrong and that I'm right. Another way of putting it is when somebody says I don't care about logic or I care answer your questions but I don't care. Then I say well then please speak up to the microphone because I want everyone to know that as you reject Christianity it's because you don't care about logic and truth. But my whole point is that the faith is logical and true and you haven't given any reason not to believe that. So as you go home, granted I'm not going to follow you home and yell in your mailbox, you got to believe, you got to believe. But as you go home this is going to be ringing in your ears that you don't care about the truth and that's your only escape from the claims of Christ. That really bothers unbelievers. Granted only the Holy Spirit can open their hearts, but that usually closes their mouths. Right here I can comment a little bit on the problem of circularity begging the question. Okay, well in the first place we want to remember and not do as some van til just give the impression that circular reasoning is perfectly okay. That's no problem with us. So if you say we're reasoning in circles that's fine. We don't make very clear what kind of circular argument we are accepting here. See if I can find a piece of chalk. If someone says your argument comes down to this the Bible is true because the Bible is true, then I'm going to say that hasn't been my argument argument at all. In fact, if you'll listen to my debate with Gordon Stein, at one point he tries to accuse me of that and I'll say when did Dr. Bonson say that? And you're trying to make that my argument. That's not my argument. I'm not saying the Bible is true because the Bible is true, much less if the Bible is true because the Bible says the Bible is true. I haven't used that as an argument and nevertheless I do reason in a circle because the kind of method that I use use is based on the authority of God speaking in the scripture. So the authority of God here I'll just abbreviate the authority of God's word in the Scripture dictates the method that I use and I use this method of argumentation to prove what ultimately the authority of God speaking in the Scripture. So if you look at that there is in the broad sense a circle. You can call that a circle. But another way of describing it which isn't critical is to say this system of thought is internally consistent with itself and all systems of thought have got to be internally consistent with themselves. Okay, so let's put an alternative up here on the board. If somebody tells me oh yeah, well the method you're using assumes the authority of Scripture, then you turn around and prove the authority of Scripture. I know that's not the logical fallacy of the Bible is true because the Bible is true, but still I don't like that because it has this broad circularity that doesn't seem acceptable to me. So I say well what do you want to propose as an alternative? Somebody says well I'm not subject the authority of any outside being like God, I'm autonomous. Okay, now because you think that you're autonomous, what method of reasoning do you use? And he says well I think human reason is the final authority. Now I'm not going to stop here, but I want to tell you because, because you're all graduate students, please notice when the unbeliever says he appeals to reason, he hasn't told you anything at all because reason can mean 35 different things easily. 35 different things. So when the unbeliever says well reason is my authority, you may want to say, well reason in what sense? In the Cartesian sense, in the Humean sense, in the Kantian sense and the Hegelian sense. But let's let it go for right now because time's going to run out. Here's the unbeliever who says my position is there is no God, I'm self sufficient, I'm a law to myself, I use reason, that's my method. Okay, and what does he want to prove with the use of reason? That there is no God and that he's autonomous. Okay? So I say well how are you going to prove that reason is the correct standard? What's he going to appeal to? He's either going to appeal to reason to prove that reason should be the authority or he's going to appeal to something else as his authority. If he appeals to something else, what then? Reason isn't his ultimate authority. So the unbeliever is caught in the circle of reasoning. On the basis of, well, using human reason atop reason is his final standard, and proving that by appealing to autonomous reason. Now, when I point that out to him, I say, see you reason in a circle. Logical fallacy. Can't do that. He's going to say, no, all that means is that my system of thought is internally consistent. I say, great. And all I'm telling you is that my system of thought is internally consistent. I use God's word as my final standard to show that God's word should be my final standard. So you got your circle, I have mine. And then you'll say, okay, well, then we can't talk with each other. We can't get through to each other. I say, oh, yeah, we can. Let's just assume that reason is the final authority. I'll play that game. But I want you to play the game as though God's word is the final authority. Now, if God's word is the final authority, all these problems you've brought up can be resolved. There is a moral absolute, there is a basis for logic, There is a basis for scientific induction, so forth. But now, if human reason is the authority, then you go through Logic is impossible, science is impossible, ethics is impossible. So, yes, you've got your reason, you have your circle. Pardon me, I have my circle. But your circle, which is to say your worldview, destroys the possibility of knowing anything. And so how do I know mine's true? What is the absolutely certain proof of God's existence, according to Van Till, that without him, you can't prove anything. Okay, one more short question. If there is as many. I think so. Okay. Why doesn't somebody like Squirrel accept your sense of. Why doesn't Sproul accept my defense of broadly circular reasoning as I've just presented it? The reason I'm hesitating is because I really want you to take this in the right way. RC doesn't accept this because he has the same kind of personal appreciation and affection for John Gerstner that I have for Cornelius Van Til. So I'm not putting him down. I mean, not automatically doing so. But my conviction is that because Gerstner tangled with Van Til and wants to insist that it's not circular, you're wrong. That it's a measure of loyalty to a person that, understandably, he has respect for and appreciation for, and it is not the sort of thing that should be so difficult for him to see. But you see, John Gerstner shouldn't have the difficulty seeing this that he does either. There is a kind of I really don't believe in psychological analysis in the place of intellectual analysis, so I feel uncomfortable doing this. But when Gerstner was here at Westminster, he tangled with Van Till, always had high regard for him. At the same time, be a mutually respectful thing. But sometimes when you get yourself embroiled in an argument, you may have noticed this. Sadly, it's hard for you to back down and say, maybe I blew it, and Gerstner just kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. And Sproul is appreciative of Gerstner's ministry in his life, and he feels the need to criticize Van Till. I love both these people. They're my Christian brothers. When I criticize them, in my eyes, what I'm doing is like going to my neighbor and saying, hey, watch out, a skunk came in your back door. You probably don't want that, you know? But as you know, sometimes if you go and tell your neighbor a skunk has come in his house and say, you're insulting me, and he takes it personally and blah, blah, blah, blah. So it isn't always received that that way. But I think it's an attempt to help my reformed brothers be more consistently reformed. So I love them. I have a positive, constructive approach to the critique. But I must say now, having put all that in context, that in their book, Classical Apologetics, they should be ashamed of themselves as scholars, ashamed of themselves for misquoting Van Till. Not just misrepresenting, that's bad enough, but misquoting him, Having somebody who's a critic of Van Till be quoted as though Van Till was saying those words, that's the kind of mistake that flunks you out of graduate school. Again, I'm not trying to be mean, but that book was a horrible book. It advances any number of philosophical ambiguities and errors, and I just think it's a shame that we can't do better to communicate with each other than reform community intellectually. However, I do believe Sproul and Gerstner are intelligent men, and they ought to be able to see this point. Every system of philosophy strives for internal consistency in that sense. Every system tries to be broadly circular, and there's nothing wrong with that. Oh, I was going to say also. And then we'll stop with this. When logic books tell you that reasoning is in a circle, or begging the question is a fallacy, you have to remember that they have to make an exception for one kind of argument. That's argument for your ultimate authority. It can't be fallacious to reason in a circle for your ultimate authority. Because by definition it wouldn't then be your ultimate authority. So when people say, but logic books say it is. Yeah, but even there are. There are exceptions even into the illustrations that logic book gives you. And this necessarily would be one such exception. It's unavoidable for everybody. Okay, Tomorrow evening, Lord willing, weather permitting, we'll talk about Kiefer Warfield, Doyvard Schaeffer, theistic, proof and evidences. Not bad for one evening's accomplishment. Please come back.