Dr Greg Bahnsen - Van Til Copernican Revolution: Kuyper and Warfield (Part 1)

Thank you very much, Tim. And thank you all for giving up your sleeping in on Saturday morning to come out and have breakfast with us, listen to a couple of lectures. I hope I can make your time worthwhile. The reason I'm on the east coast is because of a conference that was commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Cornelius Van Til, who is my professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. And so, when I was asked to speak to you, I thought it would be good to continue the theme of explaining Dr. Van Til's work and the significance of it for God's people. And I thought, I hope I'm right, that it would be of some interest to the Basilians in particular to see how Van Till, who is a giant in 20th century apologetics, stands where he stands in comparison to to the work of B.B. warfield, the old Princeton stalwart defender of the faith, and Abraham Kuyper, who represents the Amsterdam School of Theology and has a particular view of apologetics as well. In order to show you the significance, however, of what Van Til said about these two great men, it'd be good for us to know a bit about the life of Van Til. And in doing this short summary of his life, I think you can see why he was in a uniquely. He was enabled by his unique position, I think, to offer us real insight as to the strength as well as the weakness of both of these men. I've already indicated that Van Till is a great figure in terms of 20th century apologetics. Actually, in my own opinion, I could be wrong. But in my humble opinion, Van Till's stature is not just in the 20th century, but he's one of the great Christian thinkers of all time. Now, he always acknowledged he was a very gracious and a humble man. He always acknowledged that he was building on the work of others, as he liked to put it, standing on their shoulders. Nevertheless, he brought things into focus that had only been in rough and ready form, given previously, say, by the Church Father Augustine or the great reformer John Calvin. I've written an article in which I maintain that Van Till should be credited with the reformation of Christian apologetics. But if you knew something about his early life, it wouldn't have seemed that he was a likely candidate for that kind of accomplishment. But God works that way, doesn't He? In surprising ways, he utilizes unlikely candidates to mount great victories for his kingdom. Just think of David and Goliath. My guess is if you were growing up with David and you were out in the fields with him, you would not have Thought that he would have the kind of career that he would or be able to bring down a Goliath. Christianity today, back in 1977 had an issue commemorating Van Till, honoring him. He hadn't passed away yet. They honored him. And one of the things that said there is interesting, I quote, he wanted to be a farmer. Instead he became one of the foremost Christian apologists of our time. Van til was born May 3, 1895 in Holland. He was the sixth of eight children and he was born to a devout dairyman farmer who worshiped with the Reformed Auschwitink. Those who denied presumptive regeneration believed in evangelizing their children. When he was 10 years old, however, the family sailed to America and settled in the state of Indiana. And there, apparently young Cornelius enjoyed the soil. He was a good farmer, enjoyed the animals. But when he was sent off to school, it was quite evident that he had quite an ability academically. He wasn't to be a farmer after all. In 1914, Europe went to war. Van Till went to Calvin Preparatory School and College which was the educational center of the Christian Reformed Church. There he worked his way through as a part time janitor and someone who holy loved the study of philosophy. By the time he enrolled at Calvin Seminary in 1921, he had already read the works of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bovink in the original Dutch of course, and had added a knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and Latin to his Dutch and English proficiency. This is by the time he enrolled at Calvin Seminary. There he studied theology under the great Louis Berkhoff and Christian philosophy under Whitney Jellima. American Christianity in the 20s, the time of Van Till's education was reacting to the shock waves of theological liberalism which had been inspired by German higher criticism of the Bible and a Darwinian view of man. And at that time the man who stood head and shoulders above all his peers in setting forth the Christianity worthy of scholarly defense was J. Gresham Machen. Machen, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. Machen's forceful answer to one plank in the skeptical view of the New Testament. His book the Origin of Paul's Religion was published during Van Till's first year in seminary when he was at Calvin. American philosophy in the 20s was interacting with various responses to Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy. There was absolute idealism, personalism, critical realism, neorealism. And at the time in America we were coming under the sway of naturalistic ideologies like pragmatism and positivism. But among the schools of noted academic stature and Philosophy in those days was Princeton University. The philosophy department there was headed by the Scottish personalist Archibald Alan Bowman. And so, for his midler year of Seminary in 1922, Van Hill made the difficult decision to transfer to Princeton, where he could then study simultaneously at the seminary and at the university. While there, he managed the student dining club. He lived on the same floor in Alexander hall with Dr. Machen, who was then busy publishing numerous apologetical studies and including his monumental Christianity and liberalism. In 1923, Van Till's seminary advisor was C.W. hodge Jr. The grandson of Charles Hodge and the one who was the successor to B.B. warfield. At the seminary, Vantil profited from the solid biblical instruction of men like O.T. alice, Robert Dick Wilson, William Park Armstrong. But the professor closest to his heart when he was a seminary student at Princeton was Gerharda's Vaas. Those Dutch people like to stick together, don't they? Vos exercised a significant influence upon Van Till's decision to give himself to the academic and ecclesiastical struggles through which Dr. Machen was going to go in that decade. By the way, many people don't know this, but in 49, 1949, when Dr. Voss passed away, it was Cornelius Van Til who preached his funeral sermon. Anyway, the seminary granted van til a THM in Systematic Theology in 1925. The university noting his prowess especially in metaphysical analysis and his mastery of Hegel's philosophy. I mean, that in itself should make you stand back and wonder. Anybody who can master Hegel, you know, is no slouch when it comes to philosophy. But anyway, he was offered a graduate fellowship in the philosophy department and in 1927, two years later granted his PhD for a dissertation entitled God and the Absolute. Men in the seminary had kept 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 North Whitehead's Religion in the Making. And if you look at this review, you will notice if you're familiar with Van Till's apologetic All of the salient points in his presuppositional approach were clearly exhibited in the very first publication that he gave the world. He locates his opponent's crucial presuppositions. He criticizes the autonomous attitude which arises from the failure to honor the Creator, creature, distinction. He exposes the internal and destructive philosophical tensions that attend that autonomous attitude and then sets forth the only viable alternative in biblical Christianity. His next publication, in 1929, was a review of two works by Bobach and and in it another famous feature of Van Til's thinking came to expression as he insisted that the propagation and the defense of the faith required believers to abandon the impossible notion of a neutral territory of truth between believers and unbelievers. By the time the Review's publication, Van Till was back at Princeton as a visiting lecturer. And that story is interesting in itself, but we don't have time to get into all of it. J. Gresham Machen had been offered the chair of apologetics at Princeton. But Machen was also aware of the fact that there was a real problem brewing in the denomination as well as in the seminary over his conflict with liberalism, and he chose to decline. That chair, William Benton Green, who had taught apologetics previously, then recommended to the board this young student, Cornelius Van Till. And Van Til was willing to help out his school for a year. He accepted the position and at the end of the year, along with Machen and others, resigned from Princeton. He then went back to Michigan, where he was going to pastor a country church near Grand Rapids. And Machen and Stonehouse and others at Westminster prevailed upon him to come and to be a founding professor at Westminster Theological Seminary, being their first professor of apologetics. Well, now, with this little bit of background on the life and the career of Van Till, I hope you have some appreciation for why he would be in such a good position to comment on the Amsterdam and Princeton schools of thought. Thanks. Van Tilth, after all, had mastered Kuyper already before he went to seminary. Reading it in the original. He had an affection obviously for his own people and the Dutch Reformed tradition. And yet he left Calvin after one year of study to go to Princeton because of his respect for the great Presbyterian scholars that were there. Like Warfield and Machen and others, his own advisor had been the successor to B.B. warfield at Princeton. And in the end he went with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church so that he could stand with Machen and others in terms of the theological controversies of his day. And so he was very fond of and well familiar with both the Amsterdam and the Princeton traditions. The two greatest names in Reformed scholarship at that time, Abraham Kuyper and Benjamin Warfield, were people whose works that he knew very well. Now, let's take a second step here in our presentation today you see why Van Till had a unique position to comment on this. The reason why there was something to comment on is that for all of the stature of both Kuyper and Warfield, Warfield had criticized Kuyper in an introductory note that he wrote for Francis Beatty's book entitled Apologetics and I'd like to read for you some portions of Warfield's introductory note where he very politely, gently, charitably, but nevertheless firmly takes issue with Abraham Kuyper. Warfield wrote, recognized that mysticism was often an expression of irrationalism, modern irrationalism, and as such, he thought it was to be expected that mystics would not believe in the defense of the Christian faith. They would take an irrationalist approach and not care about the rational defense of the faith. And then he says, the case is very different, however, when we encounter very much the same forms of speech on the lips of the heroes of the faith who depreciate apologetics because they feel no need of reasons to ground the faith which they are sure they have received immediately from God. Apologetics, they say, will never make a Christian. Christians are made by the creative spirit alone. And when God Almighty has implanted faith in the heart, and we shall not require to seek for reasons to ground our convictions of the truth of the Christian religion we have tasted and seen, and we know of ourselves that it is from God. Thus the sturdiest belief joins hands with unbelief to disparage the defenses of the Christian religion. And so what Warfield is saying here is. It's very sad because I can understand why mystics and irrationalists disparage apologetics. But why would a great man like Abraham Kuyper do this? And the reason is, Kuyper said, faith comes from the creative work of the Spirit. So let me continue. Of Kuyper, Warfield wrote, he has written an encyclopedia of sacred theology, and in it he gives a place to apologetics among the other disciplines. But how subordinate a place and in what a curtailed form, hidden away as a subdivision of a subdivision of what Dr. Kuyper calls the dogmatological group of disciplines? One has to search for it before he finds it, and when he finds it, he discovers that its function is confined closely, we might almost say jealously, to the narrow task of defending developed Christianity against philosophy falsely, so called. See, apologetics came for Kuyper at the end of a process where Christianity is set forth in a positive way and laid out systematically. And then finally you have apologetics. And Warfield says, meanwhile, as for Christianity itself, it has remained up to this point, let us say, frankly, the great assumption, Assumption, capital A. The work of the exegete, the historian, the systematist, has all hung, so to speak, in the air. Not until all their labor is accomplished do they pause to wipe their streaming brows and ask whether they have been dealing with realities, or perchance, with fancies only then later, Warfield continues, but certainly before we draw it, that is our Christian system from the Scriptures, we must assure ourselves that there is a knowledge of God in the Scriptures. And before we do that, we must assure ourselves that there is a knowledge of God in the world. Thus we inevitably work back to first principles. And in working back to first principles, we exhibit the indispensability of an apologetical theology, which of necessity holds the place of the first among the five theological disciplines. It's easy, of course, to say that a Christian man must take his standpoint not above the Scriptures, but in the Scriptures. He very certainly must. But surely he must first have the Scriptures authenticated to him as such before he can take his stand in them. It is equally easy to say that Christianity is attained not by demonstrations, but by a new birth. Nothing could be more true, but neither could anything be more unjustified than the inferences that are drawn from this truth. For the discrediting of apologetics, it certainly is not in the power of all the demonstrations in the world to make a Christian. Paul may plant in Apollos water. It is God alone who gives the increase. But it does not seem to follow that Paul would as well, therefore not plant in Apollos as well, not water. Faith is the gift of God, but it does not in the least follow that the faith that God gives is an irrational thing. Faith that is, a faith without grounds in right reason. It is beyond all question only the prepared heart that can fitly respond to the reasons. But how can even a prepared heart respond when there are no reasons to draw out its action? He says we believe in Christ because it is rational to believe in him, not though it may seem irrational. That is, rather than saying it seems irrational, we believe anyway. We believe because it is rational to believe. We are arguing that faith is in all its exercises alike, a form of conviction, and is therefore necessarily grounded in evidence. We are arguing that evidence accordingly has its part to play in the conversion of the soul, and that the systematically organized evidence, which we call apologetic, similarly has its part to play in the Christianizing of the world. I want you to listen to these next few sentences. They're really amazing. And we are arguing that this part is not a small part, nor is it merely subsidiary part, nor yet merely a defensive part, as if the one end of apologetics were to protect an isolated body of Christians from annoyance from the surrounding world, or to aid the distracted Christian to bring his head into harmony with his heart. The part that apologetics has to play in the Christianizing of the world is rather a primary part, and it is a conquering part. It is the distinction of Christianity that it has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to dominion. Other religions may appeal to the sword or seek some other way to propagate themselves. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason and stands out among all religions, therefore, as distinctly the apologetic religion. Well, a couple of things. I know it's not great form to read long passages like this, but I want you to have a feel for why Warfield was opposing Kuyper and what Warfield wanted to protect, what was important to him. In passing, you notice Warfield's post millennialism. In this passage. It says it is Christianity's lot. I mean, that's why God put it here. To have dominion in the world, to conquer the world. He was a reconstructionist, he was a dominion theologist. Isn't that amazing? But then, we're not real proud of the way in which he expresses this. When he says it's the distinction of Christianity that has come into the world clothed with the mission to reason its way to dominion. Other religions appeal to this or that. Christianity makes its appeal to right reason. And then one more short paragraph. He says, nevertheless, there is a question here. There's a question here about Kuyper's discussion of how regeneration brings about a different mindset from what worldly thinking and develops a different system of thought than worldly systems of thought. So that Kuyper held there were really ultimately two sciences. The science of the natural principle, the unregenerate man seeing everything in a natural light, and the science of the supernatural principle, the regeneration principle. The man has been made over again and sees everything in the light of that ultimate presupposition. And now Warfield says about that. Nevertheless, there is a question here of perfection of performance rather than of kind. It is science that is produced by the subject held under sin, even though imperfect science falling away from the ideal here, there, and elsewhere, on account of all sorts of deflecting influences entering in at all points of the process. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject, the general human consciousness, though a less valuable part than it would be without sin. That last sentence calls for a little annotation, so you'll catch the significance. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject. So sinful men are engaged in science, and what they produce is truly science. It is part of that abstract science, science in the broadest sense, without qualification. It is part of that abstract science which he says is produced by the ideal subject. That is, the subject who is studying the world, doing research, reasoning, drawing conclusions. The person who is doing science is an ideal subject. We are not talking about flesh and blood, concrete individuals with their particular problems, be they regenerate, unregenerate. We're just talking about the ideal subject and abstract science. The science of sinful man is thus a substantive part of the abstract science produced by the ideal subject, the general human consciousness. So here's Warfield saying, you have a sinful man, a sinful man, but when he works in science, his contribution is that simply of a man, the ideal subject, as he put it, the general human consciousness contributing a substantive part to abstract science. To put it very simply, though men are sinners when they go out to do science and they do it properly, the sin doesn't greatly affect that. He says. Now, it would have been more valuable if sin hadn't interfered at some places. But nevertheless, man, even as a sinner, does abstract science, and he does it as an ideal subject. This is exactly the opposite of what Kiefer had taught. Kiefer had said, no, we only have regenerate and unregenerate men, and the regeneration, or the lack of regeneration affects everything they do. So this was the controversy in Van Til's day. Do you follow Warfield in saying there is one type of science and sin just kind of, you know, picks away at it and keeps you from being as valuable a scientist as you might, but what you're doing is an abstract science that's cool, common to all men? Or do you follow Kiefer by saying, no, there's really two basic worldviews, two basic principles or presuppositions, so that in principle you develop two completely different sciences and outlooks? Almost 20 years ago, I was preparing to debate R.C. sproul, who, as you know, has a ministry much, much bigger, more popular, but a ministry similar to that of the Southern California center for Christian Studies. At the time, I was teaching at Reformed Seminary, and he was coming to visit, and I knew that he didn't agree with the apologetic of Van Til, which was by and large what I was teaching. And so I wanted to hear what he had to say about it. And there was an early tape put out by the Ligonier center on Van Till lecture given by Sproul. And so of course I wanted to get this and get some idea of where he'd be coming from. And I was really set back by what I heard. Not just because I disagreed with it, but because what was said struck me as just a complete misrepresentation, a misleading misrepresentation and a gross misrepresentation of what Van Till himself had written and written in a number of places by this time. It wasn't like there was no publications. At least two books had at length discussed this issue. And what Sproul did on the tape is he said basically he was a follower of Warfield. Van Till was a follower of Kuyper. And that's really what was so sad about Van Till's work, is that being a follower of Kuyper and taking a stand against Warfield, he. He ended up not having the kind of apologetical strength and cogency that he could have had. So it seems to me this morning that it is maybe a convenient way to explain the genius of Van Till's presuppositionalism by correcting that misrepresentation for you, by looking at Van Till's approach to apologetics in the light of the conflict between Kuyper and Warfield and correcting this misrepresentation that Van Till took Kuyper's side against Warfield. By the way, it would be equally misrepresentation to say that Van Till took Warfield's side against Kuyper. And if at the end of this hour you can understand what it is he agreed with and disagreed with in each of these men, you will actually be very close to being able to explain to anybody what it is that is the genius and unique contribution. Van Till, as I've already indicated briefly to you, Kuyper understood that all men conduct their thinking and their reasoning in terms of an ultimate controlling principle, a most basic presupposition, a most basic mental attitude or perspective. And according to Kuyper, for the unbeliever, that most basic presuppositions is a natural principle, a principle that says everything must be explained naturally in terms of man's thinking being intelligible without any recourse to God, man can naturally think about the natural world and use natural principles to come to the truth. And so here's one presupposition, one ultimate perspective on life. For the believer, that ultimate presupposition is called the supernatural principle. It's based on God's involvement in man's history and experience, notably God's involvement in regeneration, providing, therefore, a framework of thinking, an outlook, a mental perspective necessary for making sense of anything. And so you have the natural principle, the ultimate presupposition of naturalistic thinking, the autonomous man. You have the supernatural principle which regenerated men use when they look at anything at all to make sense of the world and their experience. These two ultimate commitments are logically incompatible. And not only are they logically incompatible, Kuyper said, they seek to cancel each other out. There is no detente between the natural and the supernatural principle. The natural principle wants to destroy the supernatural. The supernatural wants to destroy the natural principle. And so they must, in principle, according to Kuyper, create, and this is his language, two kinds of science. Two kinds of science. They approach reasoning, research, systematization of our observations. They approach science differently. Each perspective contradicts, in principle, ultimately contradicts whatever the other perspective says and denies to it. The noble name of science. That was a choice touch, Kuyper said. Not only do they develop a different outlook and a different methodology in light of their ultimate presuppositions, they won't even grant the other one the name science. And isn't he right here? I mean, how could anyone disagree with this? If you've been in academic circles, you know very well that and this happens, by the way, not just between the religious and irreligious or Christian and non Christian approaches to scholarship. Any number of secular scholars have pointed out that there are schools of thought that have incommensurable paradigms that they use in their scientific endeavor. And that even though you have two, three, four schools of thought in biology or physics or whatever it may be, they tend to screen each other out and pretend the others don't exist. They're not important. These guys aren't even doing science. That's why they act toward each other. Is this kind of prejudice not just we come to different conclusions, but they're not even doing the game right? Okay? And so Kuyper says, said the unbelieving world looks at Christian scholarship and says, that's not even scholarship. That's superstition. That's religion. Don't we see this in our own day and age? Why is it that the evolutionary establishment doesn't want creation science taught in the classroom? Well, I've got one answer and they've got another. What a surprise. My answer is because they get embarrassed every time they have to come up against the evidence that we have. And over and over and over again, the anti evolutionary evidences cannot be dealt with adequately, convincingly by those who are advocating evolution. But they don't think that's why they don't want it taught in the classroom. You know, how could they possibly admit to themselves, look themselves in the mirror and say, look, they've got the better evidence, so we got to keep them out of the classroom. I don't think they say that to themselves. I wrote a doctoral dissertation on what they're doing. I think they're deceiving themselves about their motives and so forth. But here's what they would say, you know, and I've been part of this process just a little bit. I was supposed to be an expert witness in the Louisiana equal treatment case. And so in preparation and also when I was giving a deposition to the ACLU lawyers, this is what I ran into all the time. You see it in the news. When I debated Gordon Stein, he had this to say as well. The answer is always, that's science. What those guys are doing doesn't count as science. See, if it isn't naturalistic, it isn't scientific. And so Kiefer, years ago, had caught on to this, was, I think, brilliant in pointing that out. He says, not only do they develop different sciences, the Christian and the non Christian, they won't even grant to each other the noble name of science. And thus the unbeliever is bent on distorting, reinterpreting, or rejecting any evidence, any argumentation which is set forth in support of and which is controlled by the believer's ultimate commitment to be consistent. The unbeliever cannot even allow for the possibility that the Christian proclamation is true. Kuyper saw all this, but from it he drew a fallacious conclusion. Kuyper saw that presuppositions control your scientific endeavor, that you ultimately have two different sciences that don't in principle agree on anything, don't even call each other science. And then he drew this conclusion, which I think is fallacious. Christian apologetics is thus useless. There's no need, no pressing need to reason with the darkened understanding of the unbeliever. And I quote him, it will be impossible to settle the difference of insight. No polemics between these two kinds of science can ever serve any purpose. This is the reason why apologetics has always failed to reach results. End of quote. Well, those are pretty strong words. If there are two sciences, because there are two ultimate commitments or presuppositions, then you can't talk to each other. You can't really be successful in convincing each other. And so he said, apologetics is useless. Earlier, when I was quoting at length from Warfield, you remember, that's what Warfield got real sensitive about. He goes, oh, you can find apologetics in principles of sacred theology, but it's a subdivision of a subdivision, and once you find it, boy, you're not very impressed with what you've got. It's just kind of like a defensive mechanism. Is says, you know, you're in your ivory tower, I'm in my ivory tower, and we can't touch each other. Now, that's overstating it, but that's how Warfield saw Kuyper saying apologetics is useless. We just have different worldviews. End of story. But you see, the conclusion that war. Excuse me, that Kuyper drew. The conclusion that Kuyper drew from his very important insight about ultimate presuppositions doesn't really follow if you take other equally biblical insights into account. For instance, the unbeliever's intention may be to follow his naturalistic principle consistently, and he may claim that he's following it consistently, but in fact, in practice, to follow the naturalistic principle consistently is not at all possible. The unbeliever cannot escape the persuasive power of God's revelation around him and God's revelation within him. Indeed, by the common grace of the Holy Spirit, the unbeliever is restrained from successfully obliterating the testimony of God outside him and inside him. He conducts his life and his reasoning in terms of God's revelation, since there's no other way to learn and make sense of the world, all the while verbally denying it and convincing himself that it's not so. So in light of these sorts of biblical observations, not only is the apologist able to mount a compelling argument against the cogency of the unbeliever's espoused philosophy and the adequacy of his interpretation of the facts. But the unbeliever can be expected to understand and to feel the force of the apologist's reasoning. And so apologetical argument, intellectual reasoning, which goes beyond mere testimony to what I believe in my ivory tower must not be disparaged, must not be ignored. It must not be reduced to an effort that's futile because of subjectivity. In the ultimate presupposition of the unbeliever, Van Till said, Christianity must be presented to men as the objective truth, objective public, true for everybody, objective truth, and provably so. It is not only a moral lapse, but an unjustifiable intellectual error to reject the message of God's revealed word. So let me quote Van Till for you in 1955 in the defense of the faith. Remember the comments of RC Sproul as I now read these Words Van Till says, I am unable to follow Kiefer when from the fact of the mutually destructive character of the two principles, he concludes to the uselessness of reasoning with the natural man. I'd say Sproul got it pretty bad, badly wrong there, because Van Til said, I don't follow Kuyper when he concludes that because of the two sciences, it's useless to engage in apologetical reasoning. Okay, now I've been quoting Van Til where he says, I cannot follow Kuyper when he draws this conclusion. I'm jumping a couple of paragraphs. And he continues, hence Warfield was quite right in maintaining that Christianity is objectively defensible and the natural man has the ability to understand intellectually, though not spiritually, the challenge presented to him. And no challenge is presented to him unless it is shown him that on his principle he would destroy all truth and meaning. Then if the Holy Spirit enlightens him spiritually, he will be born again unto knowledge and adopt with love the principle he was previously anxious to destroy. That's an excellent paragraph. Bantuil says Christianity is rationally defensible. The defense is public, it's objective, and no man has any intellectual right to dispute it, to reject it. However, that defense entails calling for the natural man to reject his natural principle, his ultimate presupposition, his autonomy, because in light of that presupposition, he destroys the possibility of all truth and meaning. And so we might end the lecture at this point. I'm not going to, but we might end the lecture at this point and say, see, Sproul had it wrong. Vantu was really on Warfield's side against Kuyper. But now we need to come back and look a bit more at Warfield for a. A few moments. Warfield held that apologetics, as you know, must lay the foundation upon which systematic theology could work. He says that if systematic theology goes through all of the exegesis and systematizing its results and so forth, it's still nothing more. But what a grand assumption. We've got to get this system somehow tied down to reality, make sure it's not just, you know, dreams and fancies, so forth. And so apologetics lays the foundation for systematic theology. Indeed, the inspiration of the Scriptures was not the foundational doctrine upon which the Christian scholar should proceed. According to Warfield, the inspiration of the Scriptures, that is to say, seeing the Scriptures as God's word, not just as some historical testimony, is the last and crowning conviction of. To which the Christian comes. And that crowning conviction is based upon the authentication of the Scripture's general trustworthiness by man's right reason. So let me read again the sentence that you've heard. Surely he must first have the Scriptures authenticated to him as such before. Before he can take his standpoint in them. Faith has grounds in right reason. Let's put this together. You see the picture. If I had a blackboard, it would be really easy to show you. Before systematic theology, right reason authenticates that this is the word of God. And then within the Scriptures we systematize the results of our study and research. We thus see two things about the philosophical perspective which Warfield encouraged the apologist to take. One, that perspective should be outside of prior to commitment to Scripture. And two, it must be in agreement with what Warfield called the right reason of the unbeliever. It must be autonomous. Earlier, when I quoted WAR Warfield at length, I pointed out that he believed that there is an abstract science which the general consciousness of the human race contributes to. There's this one general thing called science. And when the unbeliever uses his right reason and contributes to the edifice of science, he will then be able to authenticate the Scripture as God's Word. And then we stand within the perspective of God's Word and do our systematic theology. So the apologist takes the position, takes a position outside of commitment to Scripture and one that secondly is in agreement with the unbelievers right reason. And it's this kind of apologetic where Christ is not the final authority which would prepare for and become the authoritative foundation of systematic theology, where Christ. Christ is the final authority. Okay, so it should be pretty obvious to you what the difference here is between Warfield and Kuyper. Warfield says Christ is not the ultimate authority. In this vestibule to faith, right reason is the ultimate authority. But right reason leads us to conclude that Christ is the ultimate authority. So you begin with the philosophy that says Christ is not not the ultimate authority. In order to prove that Christ is the ultimate authority. Kuyper says the whole thinking of the Christian man is based upon the premise that Christ is the ultimate authority. And so we develop a completely different science, a completely different outlook on everything. We have a uniquely Christian world and life view. To use contemporary language. This is what Kuyper was teaching. Warfield said, now we have a little bit of secular thinking when it's right reason, not tainted by sin, hopefully. And then that leads us progressively to the conclusion that Christ is the ultimate authority. And we do systematic theology. And Van Till has taught us that there is here two fatal flaws. First, there's the schizophrenia, which I've already telegraphed to you. I don't agree with the schizophrenia of making Christ your final authority only after he has been authorized by your own right reason. You see, if right reason has the prerogative and the ability to authorize Christ, then right reason will always be more ultimate than Christ in principle. Each and every teaching or action of Christ could then be expected on its own to pass the scrutiny of man's reasoning, lest that particular within the Bible or within your systematic theology, that particular belief provide the reason for refusing to have general trust in Christ. Follow that. If right reason is what leads me to conclude that Jesus is the final authority, then right reason has to be satisfied that anything that's presented by Jesus over here is not going to offend right reason. Because if there was something that offended right reason, you would never say, okay, then Jesus is the final authority. This is just from a conceptual standpoint. And I'd like to believe that probably even my unbelieving epistemological friends would point this out. Wherever you're coming from, you cannot have one principle that's ultimate here in conflict with the principle that this conflicting principle leads you to. Somebody says, well, what you do is you use this principle till you get to a place where you say, okay, I can see that Jesus is the final authority, and therefore I don't have the right to judge him. It's like you've climbed up by a ladder to the roof and then you kick the ladder away and you say, oh, I didn't need that ladder after all. No, because as you're going up this ladder, the point is, there may be things that you say, I'm not going to go there. Right reason wouldn't allow me to hold to the Trinity, to the Incarnation, to miracles, to the end of human history as we know it, and on and on and on. The Warfield, as you know, was much better than that. We praise God for his theological contributions. It would be supremely ungrateful for me not to say that the Lord has used his writings in my life tremendously. But Warfield was not consistent because he thought right reason was the vestibule to seeing Jesus as the ultimate authority. That's schizophrenic. Secondly, there's the mistake of taking the autonomous non Christian as somehow capable of this thing called right reason. You know, what is this crazy thing called love? What is this crazy thing called right reason? Where are we supposed to find this Dr. Warfield to think that Non Christians are capable of right reason is to forget what Warfield taught so clearly and Kuyper took so seriously. And that's that the fallen man, the unregenerate man, is corrupt in everything that he does. The clear testimony of the Bible is that the fallen man abuses his mind. Romans 1:21. He becomes vain in his reasoning. First Corinthians 2:14. He cannot receive the things of God's spirit as anything but foolishness. Proverbs 1:7. He hates knowledge. If Warfield had been consistent with this understanding, thankfully he wasn't. But if he had been consistent with what he had said, he would have ended up with both bad theology, where man is the final authority, as well as bad apologetics, where the unbelievers fundamental approach is unobjectionable. So let me see if I can bring this into focus for you. Again, a blackboard would be helpful. I should have asked for one. In logic we have some of his questions called a square of opposition, where you're putting different propositions in four different positions on the square so that you can outline their relationship to each other in terms of being absolutely contradictory. The alternate corners like this being sub alterations of one another, being in conflict with one another, and so forth. And I'm going to give you a little square of opposition. And so you're going to have to kind of pay attention. Now, if you've been listening with your eyes closed, this will only make sense if you're watching. Those of you who are listening to the tape. I'm sorry. Okay, Kiefer is on this side over here. Okay, Warfield on this side over here. And I'm going to try to make this very simple. Some of you are taking notes and I think you can take this home and it will be real, hopefully real clear. Kiefer says is a positive statement. There are two antithetical principles that produce opposing theories of knowledge. There are two antithetical principles, two basic presuppositions which are in conflict, and as such they produce opposing theories of knowledge. Two different sciences, two ultimate presuppositions, therefore two sciences. And from this now, Eden draws the conclusion. We're going to be down at this corner of the square. He draws the conclusion. Apologetics is useless. It does seem to follow if you only look at it in the abstract. Kuyper says if you have two ultimate presuppositions, two different sciences, then it follows that apologetics is useless. Now let's go over to the Warfield side of the square of opposition. Warfield held his positive presentation is that there's an objective clarity to God's revelation so that it's rational to. It's not rational. It's not rational to reject faith. There is such an objective clarity through the revelation of God that those who reject Christian faith are not being rational. And from this he concluded without taking up other things into account, as Kuyper he concluded, right reason in the natural man can interpret and judge God's revelation correctly. Right reason in the natural man can interpret and judge God's revelation correctly. So now, where did Van Till fall on this? Did he agree with the idea that there are two sciences and therefore apologetics is useless? Or did he agree that the Christian revelation is so clear that it's not rational to reject it and so appeal to the right reason of the natural man? Well, if you look at what you've put on your chart that I've outlined interestingly, the two sets of corners contradict each other, don't they? So that if you follow Kuyper's inference. Kuyper's inference is it's useless to engage in apologetics. That's directly contradictory to Warfield saying it is so objectively clear that it's not rational to reject the Christian faith. If it's objectively clear so that it's not rational to reject it, then apologetics shouldn't be useless. But Kuyper said it was useless. On the other hand, Kuyper says there are two antithetical principles and two sciences. That's up here, down here, on your left hand, my right hand side. Warfield's inference was what you can appeal to right reason, therefore. But of course, Kuyper would say you can't appeal to right reason. There's no right reason. There's two sciences. There's two understandings of reasoning. And so you see how both Warfield and Kiefer had something important, constructive and true to say, and both drew false conclusions. They fallaciously inferred things from their insight. And it's the genius of Antill. This is what I've come here to tell you this morning. It's the genius of Antille to have endorsed the two basic premises of Kuyper and Warfield without drawing their fallacious conclusions. Mantill holds, let's put this together and see what kind of apologetic strategy he would come up with. Van Til holds that the revelation of God is so objectively clear that people are not being rational when they reject it, they are violating reason and rationality when they reject it. On the other hand, because they reject the revelation of God and are unregenerate. They will go out and try to develop a different science that's in conflict with the science or thinking of the Christian. And so there really are two different worldviews being developed. However, not both worldviews are really rational. And so how do you engage effectively in apologetics? Not by appealing to the right reason of the unbeliever, but by saying you're not capable of raising right reason, that as long as you continue in your rebellion against God, you destroy rationality. And so he reverses the inference of Kuyper that apologetics is useless by saying, oh no, we got a really good apologetic because it's the only rational way to think. And he reverses the inference of Warfield by saying it's not right reason that we find in unbelievers, but the impossibility of right reason because they haven't followed the idea objective revelation of God. I'm going to end this particular lecture by reading from Van Tils the Christian Theory of Knowledge, the conclusion of his discussion of the relationship of Kuyper and Warfield. Van Til says it has not been possible to avoid a discussion of the difference between these two great modern Reformed theologians, Kuyper and Warfield. The difference between Kuyper and Warfield on the matter of apologetics is there, and it is important. It is impossible to ignore it and to speak as though there were only minor differences of emphasis between them. And now listen to this sentence. It is impossible to follow both Kuyper and Warfield, however much lovers of the Reformed faith may revere them both. On the other hand, the difference between them should not be overstressed. It was only an inconsistency on Warfield's part to advocate a method of apologetics that is out of accord with the foundational concepts of his own Reformed theology. Kuyper too, was inconsistent when, after rejecting such a method of apologetics, he yet sometimes employed it both methods. Men have also been most fortunately inconsistent in another direction. Warfield again and again in his writings shows how the principles of those who work with the idea of autonomy lead to the destruction of human experience. When he does this, he does basically what Kuyper does, that is, appeals to the sense of deity in men rather than to the principles that follow from the idea of autonomy. In other words, Warfield then rejects the idea of autonomy. He seems to hold that because of the sense of deity within men, they really in practice do not proceed from the idea of autonomy, and that they are therefore in a position to some extent they are therefore in a position to be to some extent ready to recognize the special principle for what it is. And it is this that is also true of Kuyper. He does, he does set forth the idea of autonomy and of its opposition to any manifestation of the truth of God. But he too stresses again and again the fact that no man is a finished product. Man has the sense of deity within him, and in particular he is the recipient of the common grace of God in practice. He is therefore more ready to give consideration to the presentation of the special principle than one would expect him to be. With grateful acknowledgment of indebtedness to both Kuyper and Warfield, to Herman Bovink and other associates and followers of Kuyper, to the various associates and followers of Warfield, to J. Grisham Machen in particular, we would take their common basic contribution to the idea of the full Christian faith and the self attesting, excuse me, full attesting Scripture and build, build as best we can upon it. The great contribution of Kuyper discussed in this chapter is that of his analysis of the idea of autonomy. Never again can we forget that the natural man, working from his adopted principle, will seek to weave the special revelation, the special principle, into the natural principle, and that he will seek to do this in philosophy and science no less than in theology. The great, great contribution of Warfield discussion this chapter is his insistence that Christian theism is the only internally intelligible system of truth. Combining these two great principles held by both men, but not equally emphasized by both, we shall claim that the Christian system is undoubtedly true, that it is distinguishable intellectually by men, because it is it has been distinguished for them by God through the Word, and that unless one therefore presupposes it's true, there is no theology, no philosophy and no science that can find intelligible meaning in human experience. And so did Van Til follow Kuyper or Warfield? The answer, if I can be just a little cute as I end here, is neither, but both. Thank you.