Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Gordon Haddon Clark

By John W. Robbins
A shorter version of this lecture was delivered at Biblical Theological Seminary, Hatfield, Pennsylvania, April 27, 1993.

Who Is Gordon Clark?
Carl Henry thinks Clark is “one of the profoundest evangelical Protestant philosophers of our time.” Ronald Nash has praised him as “one of the greatest Christian thinkers of our century.” He is a prolific author, having written more than 40 books during his long academic career. His philosophy is the most consistently Christian philosophy yet published, yet few seminary students hear his name even mentioned in their classes, much less are required to read his books. If I might draw a comparison, it is as though theological students in the mid-sixteenth century never heard their teachers mention Martin Luther or John Calvin. There has been a great educational and ecclesiastical blackout. Both churches and educators have gone out of their way to avoid Clark. They have cheated a generation of students and church-goers. As theological students at the end of the twentieth century, you ought not consider yourself well educated until you are familiar with the philosophy of Gordon Haddon Clark.

A Brief Biography
Clark’s life was one of controversy - theological and philosophical. He was a brilliant mind, and his philosophy continues to be a challenge to the prevailing notions of our day. It is his philosophy that makes his biography both interesting and important, for his battles were intellectual battles.

Clark was a Presbyterian minister, and his father was a Presbyterian minister before him. Born in urban Philadelphia in the summer of 1902, he died in rural Colorado in the spring of 1985. Clark was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the Sorbonne. His undergraduate degree was in French; his graduate work was in ancient philosophy. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Aristotle. He quickly earned the respect of fellow professional philosophers by publishing a series of articles in academic journals, translating and editing philosophical texts from the Greek, and editing two standard texts, Readings in Ethics and Selections from Hellenistic Philosophy. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Reformed Episcopal Seminary, Wheaton College, Butler University, Covenant College, and Sangre de Cristo Seminary. Over the course of his 60-year teaching career, he wrote more than 40 books, including a history of philosophy, Thales to Dewey, which remains the best one-volume history of philosophy in English. He also lectured widely, pastored a church, raised a family, and played chess. For the past 15 years I have been the publisher of his books and essays. More of his books are in print today than at any time during his life on Earth, yet few seminary students know anything about him.

Throughout his life Clark was enmeshed in controversy: First, as a young man in the old Presbyterian Church of Warfield and Machen, where as a ruling elder at age 27 he first fought the modernists and then helped J. Gresham Machen organize the Presbyterian Church of America, later known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Those ecclesiastical activities cost him the chairmanship of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Clark’s second major controversy was at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he taught from 1936 to 1943 after leaving the University of Pennsylvania. There his Calvinism brought him into conflict with the Arminianism of some faculty members and the administration, and he was forced to resign in 1943. Wheaton College has never been the same since, declining into a sort of vague, lukewarm, and trendy neo-evangelicalism.

From 1945 to 1973 Clark was Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he enjoyed relative academic peace and freedom. But within his denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a third major controversy arose, and there was no peace.

In 1944, at age 43, Clark was ordained a teaching elder by the Presbytery of Philadelphia. A faction led by Cornelius Van Til and composed largely of the faculty of Westminster Seminary quickly challenged his ordination. The battle over Clark’s ordination, which became known as the Clark-Van Til controversy, raged for years. In 1948 the General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church finally vindicated Clark. His ordination stood; the effort to defrock him had failed. Yet this failure of the Van Tilians to defrock Clark has been falsified by at least one biographer of Van Til, the late William White, and that falsification of history has become the stock in trade of some proponents of Van Til and Westminster Seminary.

Unfortunately, the defeat of the Van Til/Westminster Seminary faction did not end the matter. Those who had unsuccessfully targeted Clark for removal next leveled similar charges against one of Clark’s defenders. At that point, rather than spend another three years fighting a faction which had already been defeated once, Clark’s defenders left the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and Clark reluctantly went with them. Years later he told me that he would have liked to have stayed in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but felt a sense of loyalty to those who had defended him. After he left, the Van Tilians had no serious intellectual opposition within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Clark entered the United Presbyterian Church -- not the large denomination, which was not called the United Presbyterian Church at that time - but a small, more conservative, denomination. There he fought another battle about both doctrine and church property. When the United Presbyterian denomination joined the mainline church in the 1950s, Clark left that church and joined the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which later merged with the Evangelical Synod to form the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. He remained a part of that Church until it merged with the Presbyterian Church in America in 1983. Clark refused to join the Presbyterian Church in America on doctrinal grounds, and for about a year he was the RPCES. Some months before his death in April 1985 he affiliated with Covenant Presbytery.

During his lifetime Clark never settled on a name for his philosophy. At times he called it presuppositionalism; at other times dogmatism; at still other times Christian rationalism or Christian intellectualism. None of these names, I fear, catches the correct meaning. Let me explain why: Every philosophy, as I will explain in a moment, has presuppositions; some philosophers just won’t admit it. All philosophies, for the same reason, are dogmatic, though some pretend to be open-minded. And the phrase “Christian rationalism” is an awkward and misleading way of describing Clark’s views, since Clark spends a great deal of time refuting rationalism in his books. Nevertheless, one can see why Clark used the terms: Presuppositionalism was the term he used to distinguish his views from evidentialism; dogmatism was the term he used to distinguish his views from both evidentialism and rationalism; and rationalism and intellectualism were the terms he used to distinguish his views from religious irrationalism and anti-intellectualism. Clark, of course, maintained that his philosophy was Christianity, rightly understood. But since there are so many views claiming to be Christianity, it is useful to name Clark’s philosophy and thus easily distinguish it from the rest.

Therefore, I would like to begin my talk this evening by naming his philosophy - and rather than calling it Dogmatic Presuppositional Rationalism, or Rational Dogmatic Presuppositionalism, or Presuppositional Rational Dogmatism - rather than letting its title be determined by its theological opposite - I shall give it a name that discloses what it stands for: Scripturalism. It avoids all the defects of the other names, and it names what makes Clark’s philosophy unique: an uncompromising devotion to Scripture alone. Clark did not try to combine secular and Christian notions, but to derive all of his ideas from the Bible alone. He was intransigent in his devotion to Scripture: All our thoughts -- there are no exceptions -- are to be brought into conformity to Scripture, for all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are contained in Scripture. Scripturalism is the logically consistent application of Christian -- that is, Scriptural -- ideas to all fields of thought. One day, God willing, it will not be necessary to call this philosophy Scripturalism, for it will prevail under its original and most appropriate name, Christianity.

The Philosophy of Scripturalism
If I was to summarize Clark’s philosophy of Scripturalism, I would say something like this:
1. Epistemology: Propositional Revelation
2. Soteriology: Faith Alone
3. Metaphysics: Theism
4. Ethics: Divine Law
5. Politics: Constitutional Republic

Translating those ideas into more familiar language, we might say:
1. Epistemology: The Bible tells me so.
2. Soteriology: Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.
3. Metaphysics: In him we live and move and have our being.
4. Ethics: We ought to obey God rather than men.
5. Politics: Proclaim liberty throughout the land.

Clark developed this philosophy in more than 40 books, many of which were published during his lifetime, most of which are now in print, and a few of which have not been published yet. Let us first consider the foundational branch of philosophy, epistemology, the theory of knowledge.

Epistemology
Scripturalism holds that God reveals truth. Christianity is propositional truth revealed by God, propositions that have been written in the 66 books that we call the Bible. Revelation is the starting point of Christianity, its axiom. The axiom, the first principle, of Christianity is this: “The Bible alone is the Word of God.”

I must interject a few words here about axioms, for some persons, as I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, insist that they do not have any. That is like saying one does not speak prose. Any system of thought, whether it be called philosophy or theology or geometry must begin somewhere. Even empiricism or evidentialism begins with axioms. That beginning, by definition, is just that, a beginning. Nothing comes before it. It is an axiom, a first principle. That means that those who start with sensation rather than revelation, in a misguided effort to avoid axioms, have not avoided axioms at all: They have merely traded the Christian axiom for a secular axiom. They have exchanged infallible propositional revelation, their birthright as Christians, for fallible sense experience. All empiricists, let me emphasize, since it sounds paradoxical to those accustomed to thinking otherwise, are presuppositionalists: They presuppose the reliability of sensation. They do not presuppose the reliability of revelation. That is something they attempt to prove. Such an attempt is doomed.

Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian, tried to combine two axioms in his system: the secular axiom of sense experience, which he obtained from Aristotle, and the Christian axiom of revelation, which he obtained from the Bible. His synthesis was unsuccessful. The subsequent career of western philosophy is the story of the collapse of Thomas’ unstable Aristotelian-Christian condominium. Today the dominant form of epistemology in putatively Christian circles, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, is empiricism. Apparently today’s theologians have learned little from Thomas’ failure. If Thomas Aquinas failed, one doubts that Norman Geisler can succeed.

The lesson of the failure of Thomism was not lost on Clark. Clark did not accept sensation as his axiom. He denied that sense experience furnishes us with knowledge at all. Clark understood the necessity of refuting all competing axioms, including the axiom of sensation. His method was to eliminate all intellectual opposition to Christianity at its root. In his books - such as A Christian View of Men and Things, Thales to Dewey, Religion, Reason, and Revelation, and Three Types of Religious Philosophy - he pointed out the problems, failures, deceptions, and logical fallacies involved in believing that sense experience provides us with knowledge.

Clark’s consistently Christian rejection of sense experience as the way to knowledge has many consequences, one of which is that the traditional proofs for the existence of God are all logical fallacies. David Hume and Immanuel Kant were right: Sensation cannot prove God, not merely because God cannot be sensed or validly inferred from sensation, but because no knowledge at all can be validly inferred from sensation. The arguments for the existence of God fail because both the axiom and method are wrong - the axiom of sensation and the method of induction - not because God is a fairy tale. The correct Christian axiom is not sensation, but revelation. The correct Christian method is deduction, not induction.

Another implication of the axiom of revelation is that those historians of thought who divide epistemologies into two types of philosophy, empiricist and rationalist, as though there were only two possible choices -- sensation and logic - are ignoring the Christian philosophy, Scripturalism. There are not only two general views in epistemology; there are at least three, and we must be careful not to omit Christianity from consideration simply by the scheme we choose for studying philosophy.

Another implication of the axiom of revelation is this: Rather than accepting the secular view that man discovers truth and knowledge on his own power using his own resources, Clark asserted that truth is a gift of God, who graciously reveals it to men. Clark’s epistemology is consistent with his soteriology: Just as men do not attain salvation themselves, on their own power, but are saved by divine grace, so men do not gain knowledge on their own power, but receive knowledge as a gift from God. Knowledge of the truth is a gift from God. Man can do nothing apart from the will of God, and man can know nothing part from the revelation of God. We do not obtain salvation by exercising our free wills; we do not obtain knowledge by exercising our free intellects. Clark’s epistemology is a Reformed epistemology. All other epistemologies are inconsistent and ultimately derived from non-Christian premises. No starting point, no proposition, no experience, no observation, can be more truthful than a word from God: “Because he could swear by no greater, he swore by himself,” the author of Hebrews says. If we are to be saved, we must be saved by the words that come out of the mouth of God, words whose truth and authority are derived from God alone.

Scripturalism does not mean, as some have objected, that we can know only the propositions of the Bible. We can know their logical implications as well. The Westminster Confession of Faith, which is a Scripturalist document, says that “The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is Truth itself), the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God” (emphasis added). By these words, and by the fact that the Confession begins with the doctrine of Scripture, not with the doctrine of God, and certainly not with proofs for the existence of God, the Confession shows itself to be a Scripturalist document.

Continuing with the idea of logical deduction, the Confession says: “The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men.”

Notice the claim of the Confession: “The whole counsel of God” is either expressly set down in Scripture or may be deduced from it. Everything we need for faith and life is found in the propositions of the Bible, either explicitly or implicitly. Nothing is to be added to the revelation at any time. Only logical deduction from the propositions of Scripture is permitted. No synthesis, no combination with unscriptural ideas is either necessary or permissible.

Logic -- reasoning by good and necessary consequence -- is not a secular principle not found in Scripture and added to the Scriptural axiom; it is contained in the axiom itself. The first verse of John’s Gospel may be translated, “In the beginning was the Logic, and the Logic was with God and the Logic was God.” Every word of the Bible, from Bereshith in Genesis 1 to Amen in Revelation 22, exemplifies the law of contradiction. “In the beginning” means in the beginning, not a hundred years or even one second after the beginning. “Amen” expresses agreement, not dissent. The laws of logic are embedded in every word of Scripture. Only deductive inference is valid, and deductive inference - using the laws of logic -- is the principal tool of hermeneutics. Sound exegesis of Scripture is making valid deductions from the statements of Scripture. If your pastor is not making valid deductions from Scripture in his sermons, then he is not preaching God’s Word. It is in the conclusions of such arguments, as well as in the Biblical statements themselves, that our knowledge consists.

Some will object, “But don’t we know that we are in this room, or that 2 plus 2 equals four, or that grass is green?” To answer that objection, we must define the words “know” and “knowledge.”

There are three sorts of cognitive states: knowledge, opinion, and ignorance. Ignorance is simply the lack of ideas. Complete ignorance is the state of mind that empiricists say we are born with: We are all born with blank minds, tabula rasa, to use John Locke’s phrase. (Incidentally, a tabula rasa mind - a blank mind - is an impossibility. A consciousness conscious of nothing is a contradiction in terms. Empiricism rests on a contradiction.) At the other extreme from ignorance is knowledge. Knowledge is not simply possessing thoughts or ideas, as some think. Knowledge is possessing true ideas and knowing them to be true. Knowledge is, by definition, knowledge of the truth. We do not say that a person “knows” that 2 plus 2 is 5. We may say he thinks it, but he does not know it. It would be better to say that he opines it.

Now, most of what we colloquially call knowledge is actually opinion: We “know” that we are in Pennsylvania; we “know” that Clinton - either Bill or Hillary - is President of the United States, and so forth. Opinions can be true or false; we just don’t know which. History, except for revealed history, is opinion. Science is opinion. Archaeology is opinion. John Calvin said, “I call that knowledge, not what is innate in man, nor what is by diligence acquired, but what is revealed to us in the Law and the Prophets.” Knowledge is true opinion with an account of its truth.

It may very well be that William Clinton is President of the United States, but I do not know how to prove it, nor, I suspect, do you. In truth, I do not know that he is President, I opine it. I can, however, prove that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. That information is revealed to me, not by the dubious daily newspaper or the evening news, but by the infallible Word of God. The resurrection of Christ is deduced by good and necessary consequence from the axiom of revelation.

Any view of knowledge that makes no distinction between the cognitive standing of Biblical propositions and statements found in the daily paper does three things: First, it equivocates by applying one word, “knowledge,” to two quite different sorts of statements: statements infallibly revealed by the God who can neither lie nor make a mistake, and statements made by men who both lie and make mistakes; second, by its empiricism, it actually makes the Biblical statements less reliable than those in the daily paper, for at least some statements in the paper are subject to empirical investigation and Biblical statements are not; and third, it thereby undermines Christianity.

Revelation is our only source of truth and knowledge. Neither science, nor history, nor archaeology, nor philosophy can furnish us with truth and knowledge. Scripturalism takes seriously Paul’s warning to the Colossians: “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in him....”

One naive objection to the axiom of revelation crops up repeatedly: Don’t I have to read the Bible? Don’t I have to know that I have a book in my hands and that that book is the Bible? Don’t I have to rely on the senses to obtain revelation?

First, this objection begs the epistemological question, How does one know, by assuming that one knows by means of the senses. But that is the conclusion that ought to be proved. The proper response to these questions is another series of questions: How do you know you have a book in your hands? How do you know that you are reading it? What is sensation? What are perceptions? What is abstraction? Tell us how some things called sensations become the idea of God. The naive question - Don’t you have to read the Bible? - assumes that empiricism is true. It ignores all the arguments demonstrating the cognitive failure of empiricism. An acceptable account of epistemology, however, must begin at the beginning, not in the middle. Few theologians, and even fewer philosophers, however, want to start at the beginning.

But there is another confusion in this question: It assumes that revelation is not a distinct means of gaining knowledge, but that even revealed information has to be funneled through or derived from the senses. A conversation between Peter and Christ will indicate how far this assumption is from the Scriptural view of epistemology:

”He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’
”And Simon Peter answered and said, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.’
”Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in Heaven.’ “

Presumably Peter had “heard” with his ears and “seen” with his eyes, but Christ says that his knowledge did not come by flesh and blood - it did not come by the senses; it came by revelation from the Father. That is why Christ forbids Christians to be called teacher, “for one is your Teacher, the Christ” (Matthew 23). It is in God, not matter, that we live and move, and have our being.

Soteriology
Soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, is a branch of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Soteriology is not a branch of metaphysics, for men did not cease to be men when they fell, nor are they deified when they are saved; saved men, even in Heaven, remain temporal and limited creatures. Only God is eternal; only God is omniscient; only God is omnipresent.

Nor is soteriology a branch of ethics, for men are not saved by works. We are saved in spite of our works, not because of them.

Nor is soteriology a branch of politics, for the notion that salvation, either temporal or eternal, can be achieved by political means is an illusion. Attempts to immanentize the eschaton have brought nothing but blood and death to Earth.

Salvation is by faith alone. Faith is belief of the truth. God reveals truth. Faith, the act of believing, is a gift of God. “By his knowledge, my righteous servant shall justify many.”

Clark’s view of salvation, reflected in the Westminster Confession’s chapter on justification, is at odds with most of what passes for Christianity today. Popular Christianity decries knowledge. Clark points out that Peter says that we have received everything we need for life and godliness through knowledge. James says the Word of Truth regenerates us. Paul says we are justified through belief of the truth. Christ says we are sanctified by truth.

There are three popular theories of sanctification today: sanctification by works, sanctification by emotions, sanctification by sacraments. The first, sanctification by works, is sometimes expressed by those who claim to be Reformed or Calvinist: They teach that we are justified by faith, but we are sanctified by works. Calvin had no such view, and the Westminster Confession refutes it. The second view, sanctification by emotions, is the view of the Pentecostal, charismatic, and holiness groups. Roman Catholic and other churches that believe in the magical power of sacraments to regenerate or sanctify hold the third view, sanctification by sacraments. But just as we are regenerated by truth alone, and justified through belief of the truth alone, we are sanctified by truth alone as well.

Metaphysics
Let us turn briefly to metaphysics. Clark wrote relatively little on the subject of metaphysics in the narrow philosophical sense. Clark was, obviously, a theist. God, revealed in the Bible, is spirit and truth. Since truth always comes in propositions, the mind of God, that is, God himself, is propositional. Clark wrote a book called The Johannine Logos, in which he explained how Christ could identify himself with his words: “I am the Truth.” “I am the Life.” “The words that I speak to you are truth and life.” Clark, like Augustine, was accused of “reducing” God to a proposition. Rather than fleeing from such an accusation, Clark astonished some of his readers by insisting that persons are indeed propositions. Some have been so confused by his statement that they think he said that propositions are persons, and so they wonder whether a declarative sentence, The cat is black, is really a person.

Knowledge is knowledge of the truth, and truth is unchanging. Truth is eternal. We know David was King of Israel and that Jesus rose from the dead, not because we saw them, but because God has revealed those truths to us. They are knowledge because they are revealed as truth. Because we all live and move and have our being in God, both thought and communication are possible. Communication is not based on having the same sensations, as empiricists think, but on having the same ideas. We can never have the same sensations as another person - you cannot have my toothache, and I cannot see your color blue - but we can both think that justification is by faith alone. Empiricism, which promises us an objective reality - the reality it calls matter -- delivers only solipsism. In the material world the empiricists describe, each of us - if indeed I am more than one of your headaches or nightmares - is shut inside our own sensations, and there is no escape. Science, however, is an attempt to escape the solipsism of sensation.

Those Christians who put their trust in science as the key to understanding the material universe should be embarrassed by the fact that science never discovers truth. One of the insuperable problems of science is the fallacy of induction; indeed, induction is an insuperable problem for all forms of empiricism. The problem is simply this: Induction, arguing from the particular to the general, is always a fallacy. No matter how many white swans one observes, one never has sufficient reason to say all swans are white. There is another fatal fallacy in the scientific method as well: asserting the consequent. Bertrand Russell put the matter this way:
All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: “If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.” This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. [It is the fallacy of asserting the consequent.] Suppose I were to say: “If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone and stones are nourishing.” If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the argument upon which all scientific laws are based (emphasis added).

Recognizing that the problem of induction is insoluble, and that asserting the consequent is a logical fallacy, philosophers of science in the twentieth century, in an effort to justify science, developed the notion that science does not rely on induction at all. Instead, it consists of conjectures and refutations. That is the title of a book by Karl Popper, one of the leading philosophers of science in this century. But in their attempt to save science from epistemological disgrace, the philosophers of science had to abandon any claim to knowledge: Science is nothing but conjectures and refutations of conjectures. Popper wrote:
First, although in science we do our best to find the truth, we are conscious of the fact that we can never be sure whether we have got it.... [W]e know that our scientific theories always remain hypotheses.... [I]n science there is no “knowledge” in the sense in which Plato and Aristotle understood the word, in the sense which implies finality; in science, we never have sufficient reason for the belief that we have attained the truth.... Einstein declared that his theory was false: he said that it would be a better approximation to the truth than Newton’s, but he gave reasons why he would not, even if all predictions came out right, regard it as a true theory.... Our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement;... our knowledge, our doctrine is conjectural;... it consist of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths.

Those theologians who accept observation and science as the basis for arguing for the truth of Christianity are attempting the impossible. Science cannot furnish us with truth about the material universe that it purports to describe, let alone truth about God. The empirical worldview, which begins with a metaphysics of matter, knowledge of which we obtain from sensation, cannot furnish us with knowledge at all. In him - not in matter - we live and move and have our being.

Ethics
Clark’s ethical philosophy is also derived from the axiom of revelation. The distinction between right and wrong depends entirely upon the commands of God. There is no natural law that makes some actions right and others wrong. In the words of the Shorter Catechism, sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. Were there no law of God, there would be no right or wrong.

This may be seen very clearly in God’s command to Adam not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only the command of God made eating the fruit sin. It may also be seen in God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. God’s command alone made the sacrifice right, and Abraham hastened to obey. Strange as it may sound to modern ears used to hearing so much about the right to life, or the right to decent housing, or the right to choose, the Bible says that natural rights and wrongs do not exist: Only God’s commands make some things right and other things wrong.

In the Old Testament, it was a sin for the Jews to eat pork. Today, we can all enjoy bacon and eggs for breakfast, although Theonomists, Reconstructionists, Seventh Day Adventists, and Judaizers might choke. And it may bother some who are not Theonomists to learn that God might have made the killing of a human being or the taking of property a virtue, not a sin. That is one of the lessons of the story of Abraham. But in fact God made killing an innocent man a sin. In this world God commands, “You shall not murder.” What makes murder wrong is not some presumed or pre-existing right to life, but the divine command itself.

If we possessed rights because we are men - if our rights were natural and inalienable - then God himself would have to respect them. But God is sovereign. He is free to do with his creatures as he sees fit. One need read only Isaiah 40. So we do not have natural rights. That is good, for natural and inalienable rights are logically incompatible with punishment of any sort. Fines, for example, violate the inalienable right to property. Imprisonment violates the inalienable right to liberty. Execution violates the inalienable right to life. Natural right theory is logically incoherent at its foundation. Natural rights are logically incompatible with justice. The Biblical idea is not natural rights, but imputed rights. Only imputed rights, not intrinsic rights - natural and inalienable rights -- are compatible with liberty and justice. And those rights are imputed by God.

Furthermore, Clark demonstrates, all attempts to base ethics on some foundation other than revelation fail. Natural law is a failure, as David Hume so obligingly pointed out, because “oughts” cannot be derived from “ises.” In more formal language, the conclusion of an argument can contain no terms that are not found in its premises. Natural lawyers, who begin their arguments with statements about man and the universe, statements in the indicative mood, cannot end their arguments with statements in the imperative mood.

The major ethical theory competing with natural law theory today is utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tells us that a moral action is one that results in the greatest good for the greatest number. It furnishes an elaborate method for calculating the effects of choices. Unfortunately, utilitarianism is also a failure, for it not only commits the naturalistic fallacy of the natural lawyers, it requires a calculus that cannot be executed as well. We cannot know what is the greatest good for the greatest number.

The only logical basis for ethics is the revealed commands of God. They furnish us not only with the basic distinction between right and wrong, but with detailed instructions and practical examples of right and wrong. They actually assist us in living our daily lives. Secular attempts to provide an ethical system fail on both counts.

Politics
Clark did not write a great deal about politics either, but it is clear from what he did write that he grounded his political theory on revelation, not on natural law, nor on the consent of the governed, nor on the exercise of mere force.

In a long chapter in A Christian View of Men and Things, he argues that attempts to base a theory of politics on secular axioms result in either anarchy or totalitarianism. He argues that only Christianity, which grounds the legitimate powers of government not in the consent of the governed but in the delegation of power by God, avoids the twin evils of anarchy and totalitarianism.

Government has a legitimate role in society: the punishment of evildoers and the praise of the good, as Paul put it in Romans 13. Education, welfare, housing, parks, retirement income, health care, the exploration of space, and most of the thousands of other programs in which government is involved today are illegitimate. The fact that government is involved in all these activities is a primary reason why government is not doing its legitimate job well: Crime is rising, and the criminal justice system is a growing threat to freedom. People are tried twice for the same crime, their property is taken without due process of law or just compensation, innocent persons are punished and guilty persons released.

Clark believed that the Bible teaches a distinctly limited role for government. The current activities of many Christians in politics would have been foreign to his thinking. The Biblical goal is not a large bureaucracy staffed by Christians, but virtually no bureaucracy. There should be no Christian Department of Education, no Christian Housing Department, no Christian Agriculture Department, simply because there should be no Departments of Education, Housing, and Agriculture, period. We do not need and should oppose a Christian Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms or a Christian Internal Revenue Service. So-called evangelical Christians are engaged in a pursuit of political power that makes their activities almost indistinguishable from the activities of the social gospelers in the early and mid-twentieth century. This sort of political action has nothing to do with Scripture.

The System
Each of the parts of this philosophical system -- epistemology, soteriology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics -- is important, and the ideas gain strength from being arranged in a logical system. In such a system, where propositions are logically dependent on or logically imply other propositions, each part mutually reinforces the others. Historically - though not in this decadent century - Calvinists have been criticized for being too logical. But if we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, if we are to bring all our thoughts into conformity with Christ, we must learn to think as Christ does, logically and systematically.

Gordon Clark elaborated a complete philosophical system that proceeds by rigorous deduction from one axiom to thousands of theorems. Each of the theorems fits into the whole system. If you accept one of the theorems, you must, on pain of contradiction, accept the whole. But many leaders in the professing church feel no pain, and some even glory in contradiction. They are utterly confused and are thwarting the advance of the kingdom of God.

Scripturalism - Christianity - is a whole view of things thought out together. It engages non-Christian philosophies on every field of intellectual endeavor. It furnishes a coherent theory of knowledge, an infallible salvation, a refutation of science, a theory of the world, a coherent and practical system of ethics, and the principles required for political liberty and justice. No other philosophy does. All parts of the system can be further developed; some parts have been barely touched at all. It is my hope and prayer that the philosophy of Scripturalism will conquer the Christian world in the next century. If it does not, if the church continues to decline in confusion and unbelief, at least a few Christians can take refuge in the impregnable intellectual fortress that God has given us in his Word. May you be among those few.

Cornelius Van Til

By John M. Frame
This essay was originally published in Walter Elwell, ed., Handbook of Evangelical Theologians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), pp. 156-167.

Cornelius Van Til was born on May 3, 1895, in Grootegast, the Nether­lands, the sixth son of Ite Van Til, a dairy farmer, and his wife Klazina.l At the age of ten Cornelius moved with his family to Highland, Indiana. He picked up English quickly and spoke thereafter with very little trace of an accent.

The first of his family to receive a formal higher education, Van Til in 1914 entered Calvin Preparatory School in Grand Rap­ids, where he remained to study at Calvin College and at Calvin Theological Sem­inary. These institutions were all schools of Van Til's denomination, the Christian Re­formed Church, which was made up mostly of Dutch immigrants like himself. But after his first year of seminary, Van Til trans­ferred to Princeton Theological Seminary. In those days, Princeton was an orthodox Calvinistic school, as was Calvin, and there was much mutual respect between the two; but Princeton's roots were in American Presbyterianism rather than in the Dutch Reformed tradition represented by Calvin. While in seminary, Van Til was also ad­mitted to Princeton University as a gradu­ate student in philosophy, working on a doctorate as he completed his seminary course.2 In 1925 he completed a Th.M. at the seminary and married his childhood sweetheart, Rena Klooster; in 1927 he com­pleted a Ph.D. at the university.

Influences
During his years in the Dutch Reformed community, Van Til became very impressed with the great Dutch church leaders Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck. Kuyper was a Renaissance man: scholar, university founder, politician (briefly prime minister of the Netherlands), newspaper editor. With boundless energy and intellectual creativity, he sought to claim all areas of human life for the lordship of Christ. Bavinck, his colleague and follower, fo­cused more narrowly on the discipline of systematic theology and produced a monu­mental four-volume Reformed Dogmatics. The work of Klaas Schilder, a more recent Dutch thinker, also commanded Van Til's deep respect and interest.

Van Til arrived in Princeton too late to study with B. B. Warfield, arguably the greatest theological scholar America has produced, who had died in 1921; but Warfield's name was legendary during Van Til's student days, and Van Til respected him deeply, as well as Warfield's predecessor, the great Princeton theologian of the previ­ous century, Charles Hodge. While at the seminary, Van Til became a close friend of Professor Geerhardus Vos, like himself a Dutch immigrant who had left Grand Rap­ids for Princeton. Vos brought to Princeton the discipline of "biblical theology," which sought to understand Scripture as a history of redemption. Van Til himself was more philosophically than exegetically inclined, but one can find echoes of Vos in Van Til's writings. Van Til's preaching and much of his classroom teaching also contained a great deal of biblical theology; he would, for instance, trace the human epistemological predicament from the Garden of Eden to the judgments of Revelation.

The philosophical influences upon Van Til are a bit harder to define. At Calvin his most famous teacher was W. Harry Jellema, described in my hearing by a well-known non-Christian philosopher as "the best teacher of philosophy in the United States." Jellema himself had studied with the Harvard idealist Josiah Royce, and may have motivated Van Til to study idealism at Princeton. Van Til's dissertation advisor at Princeton University was Archibald A. Bowman, whose sympathies also were with idealism and with the developing personalist movement. As did James Orr, with whose writings Van Til's apologetics shows some affinity, Van Til made liberal use of the idealist vocabulary (the philosophical use of the term presupposition originated in idealism). Nonetheless, Van Til always in­sisted that he rejected the substantive con­tent of idealism, which identified the cre­ator with the creature and made them subject to one another within an imper­sonal universe.

The most important philosophical influ­ences on Van Til were distinctively Chris­tian rather than idealist. Kuyper himself had urged that all human thought be gov­erned by a Christian worldview derived from Scripture. To Kuyper, this worldview was antithetical to every secular ideology, whether philosophical, political, economic, aesthetic, or whatever. Kuyper's disciples sought to bring the Christian worldview to bear on politics, education, and journalism; naturally, some sought to express it in phi­losophy as well. Thus in the 1920s Herman Dooyeweerd, D. H. Theodoor Vollenhoven, and others in the Netherlands founded a school of thought called the "philosophy of the idea of law." It is unclear whether this school influenced the initial formulations of Van Til's apologetic, or whether he had developed his approach before his contact with the Dutch philosophy. Certainly there are many similarities, but also important differences. At any rate, Van Til wrote fa­vorably about the early work of the Dutch school; and they, in turn, named Van Til as an editor of their journal, Philosophia Reformata. Though Van Til later became crit­ical of this group, he was always aware of the developments among them. Surely, then, in a broad sense at least, we must list the Dooyeweerdian school as one signifi­cant influence on Van Til's thought.

Career
After his graduation in 1927, Van Til spent one year as the pastor of the Christian Reformed Church in Spring Lake, Michi­gan, a work which he deeply enjoyed. He took a leave of absence from the pastorate to teach apologetics at Princeton Seminary during the academic year 1928-29. When the seminary offered him the chair of apol­ogetics (in effect, a full professorship) at the end of that period, Van Til turned down the offer and returned to Spring Lake. He was strongly inclined to remain in the pastorate, and in addition he did not wish to cooperate in the reorganization of Princeton Seminary which had been mandated that spring by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. The reorganization was intended to purge the seminary's his­toric stand for orthodox Calvinism and make the school more representative of "all the points of view found in the church." To be included were the points of view of the thirteen hundred ministers who in 1924 had signed the notorious Auburn Affirmation, which declared the doctrines of biblical inspiration, the virgin birth of Christ, his substitutionary atonement, his bodily resur­rection, and literal second coming to be hu­manly formulated theories; hence, ministe­rial candidates need not be required to subscribe to them.

However, there were those in the Presby­terian Church in the U.S.A. who fought against the unbelief growing through­out the denomination and the church at large. The most notable of these was J. Gresham Machen, a teacher of New Tes­tament at Princeton Seminary. Van Til did not study under Machen but knew him well and admired his scholarship, his ability to articulate the truth, and his stand for ortho­dox doctrine. Machen must be added to our list of men who influenced Van Til, for almost everything Van Til wrote and taught reflects Machen's theme that orthodoxy is indispensable to a Christian profession.5 The great doctrines of the faith are not hu­man inventions, but the teachings of God himself to us in his Word. One cannot claim to be a Christian while rejecting the teach­ings of Christ in Scripture. Indeed, Van Til went one step beyond Machen, seeking to show that orthodox Christian doctrine is, in one sense, necessary for all rational thought and conduct (see pp. 164, 166).

In response to the reorganizing of Princeton Seminary, Machen with other faculty members (Robert Dick Wilson, Os­wald T. Allis) determined to start a new seminary that would be independent of the General Assembly's control and would continue to give students orthodox instruc­tion in the tradition of Warfield, Vos, and Hodge. Younger men, R. B. Kuiper, Ned B. Stonehouse, Allan MacRae, and Paul Woolley, were added to the faculty; and Machen was eager to obtain Van Til's services in the area of apologetics. Van Til was extremely reluctant to leave Spring Lake, but after much correspondence and personal visits by Allis, Stonehouse, and Machen himself, Van Til, several days before opening exer­cises, accepted the offer. Westminster Theological Seminary opened its doors in Philadelphia in the fall of 1929, and Van Til remained on the faculty there until his re­tirement in 1972.

In 1936, Machen and several others were suspended from the ministry of the Presby­terian Church in the U.S.A. for their unwill­ingness to resign from an independent mis­sion board which Machen had founded. The independent board represented conser­vative dissatisfaction with the official mis­sion board, which tolerated among its mis­sionaries liberal teaching along the lines of the Auburn Affirmation. Machen and the others did not accept this church discipline; among other irregularities, the ecclesiastical court had not permitted Machen to make a scriptural case for his conduct. So Machen and 130 other ministers founded a new denomination, originally called the Presbyterian Church of America,6 but later forced to change its name under legal threat. Eventually the body called itself the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In sympa­thy with Machen, Van Til transferred his membership from the Christian Reformed Church to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, where he remained until his death in 1987.7

Publications
Van Til's first book, The New Modernism, caused a storm.8 In it he attacked the idea that Karl Barth and Emil Brunner were ba­sically Reformed evangelicals. As he else­where expressed his conclusion, "Barth simply does not believe the Christ of the Scripture at all."

Van Til's second book tackled the sub­ject of Common Grace. The Defense of the Faith followed in 1955, the first complete public presentation of his distinctive apol­ogetic system.11 Incorporating much of his basic unpublished syllabus Apologetics, it included answers to his critics. For after Van Til had taught at Calvin Seminary for one semester in 1952, a number of articles attacking his positions appeared in the Calvin Forum. James Daane, a Christian Reformed minister, wrote a whole volume critical of Van Til, A Theology of Grace.12 Earlier, J. Oliver Buswell had written a very negative review of Van Til's Common Grace in his publication The Bible Today. Van Til addressed both Buswell and the Daane- Calvin Forum group in The Defense of the Faith. In 1963, the book was released in an abridged form that left out most of the debate between Van Til and his critics. In 1962, Van Til published his second major critique of Barth, Christianity and Barthianism (the title intentionally remi­niscent of Machen's Christianity and Liber­alism). A Christian Theory of Knowledge appeared in 1969. A somewhat expanded version of the syllabus of the same name, it incorporated some of the debate between Van Til and his critics that had been left out of the second edition of The Defense of the Faith.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, Van Til seems to have lost much of his reserve about publishing. A great many books came out in rapid succession: Is God Dead? The Confession of 1967, Christ and the Jews, The Sovereignty of Grace, The New Hermeneutic, The New Synthesis Theology of the Netherlands, The God of Hope. Most of these are fairly minor works, less impor­tant, at least, to the understanding of Van Til's thought than are some of his more ba­sic syllabi. Of those books still considered unpublished syllabi, some are among Van Til's most important writings: An Introduction to Systematic Theology, Christian-Theistic Evidences, Christian Theistic Ethics. His original syllabus, dating to 1929, was re-released in the 1970s as A Survey of Christian Epistemology-- still an unpublished syllabus.14

Van Til also published a great many arti­cles and reviews. Of his many pamphlets, Why I Believe in God deserves special no­tice. Perhaps the only writing Van Til ac­tually directed toward unbelievers, it raises more questions than it answers, but it is well worth reading, for it contains some of the best writing Van Til ever did.

Teaching Style
Van Til quickly developed the reputation of having a brilliant mind with an encyclo­pedic knowledge of philosophy and theol­ogy. Personally, he was gracious and charming, with a sometimes wild sense of humor. He was said to be like the apostle Paul in that his writings were weighty and powerful, but his physical presence meek (2 Cor. 10:10). He spent as much time with simple people as with brilliant intellectuals. He would regularly visit sick friends in the hospital and minister to others in the hospi­tal rooms, engaging them in conversation and prayer. He was generous with his time and resources—often willing to preach in little struggling churches and nursing homes, or supplying correspondents with some of his syllabi at his own expense.

As to his communication skills, perhaps the jury is still out. His preaching was very eloquent and challenging; in some ways it was better than his teaching. His teaching method was to assign readings in some of his unpublished syllabi and in the writings of others, and then to conduct a class discussion punctuated by ad hoc lectures on various topics which happened to come up. The discussion proceeded fast, too fast for many of the students, for they had no philo­sophical (and little theological) back­ground. Van Til would write names and concepts on the board, usually just the first few letters of each word; at times the pace was dizzying. He rarely defined his con­cepts precisely. When students asked for definitions or tried to reduce his arguments to a logical sequence, Van Til usually re­sisted. What he did in such cases was to back up and start over, using essentially the same language he had used before. He seemed to think that regular repetition of certain ideas would result in their entering the students' minds by a kind of osmosis.

Van Til did have a great knack for illus­trations and slogans—reducing complex ideas to homely, familiar dimensions. His lifelong love of farming revealed itself in stories about chickens and cows. Or con­sider some of his similes describing the un­believer. The unbeliever's mind is like a buzz saw that works very efficiently but in the wrong direction.17 The unbeliever who tries to explain the universe as the product of sheer chance is like a man made of water who tries to climb out of the water on a lad­der made of water. The unbeliever is prej­udiced about everything, like a man with yellow glasses cemented to his face—"all is yellow to the jaundiced eye."19 Students tended to latch on to these illustrations and short formulations (e.g., "the point of con­tact is deep within the natural man")20 and would begin to feel that they had under­stood Van Til. Unfortunately, too often that understanding was rudimentary at best and erroneous at worst. Van Til himself was quite aware that there is only so much that one can learn through slogans and illustra­tions; eventually there must be careful analysis. (Thus he told us that term papers that merely repeated his slogans and illustrations without careful analysis would be graded no higher than "C.") But teaching the process of analysis was not Van Til's gift. Therefore even today there are many-- both friends and opponents of Van Til's ideas—who have extremely confused no­tions of what he actually taught.21

Thus his modest reluctance to publish may not have been without basis. His books and syllabi contain some of the same prob­lems: the force of his bold, exciting summa­ries, illustrations, and exhortation is weak­ened by inadequate definition, analysis, and argument. This reflects, to some extent, deficiency in communication skills, but also—and perhaps more significantly—Van Til's isolation.

Van Til always was something of an out­sider in the theological, philosophical, and apologetic discussions of his day. A Dutch­man teaching in a distinctively American environment, a rejecter of mainstream lib­eral theology who sought to excel as a theo­logian and philosopher, a Christian apolo­gist who rejected virtually the entire tradition of apologetics as it had been prac­ticed since the second century. He often spoke of the isolation of the Reformed faith, even as he made strongly negative comments about Roman Catholic, Arminian, and "less consistent Calvinist" theology. His negativity naturally led to more isolation. Rarely did Van Til engage in dia­logue with other positions; rather, his style was confrontation.

Van Til's language, too, contributed to his isolation. Unlike most of the popular apologists, he used a great many technical philosophical and theological expressions, often inadequately defined and analyzed; even his homely illustrations could not compensate for his daunting style. Beyond this, his philosophical vocabulary was not the kind easily understood by other philos­ophers. Van Til's philosophical background was idealist, and increasingly during his ca­reer the philosophical climate turned away from idealism. In America, the newer movements were various forms of language analysis, which took great pride in their clarity, sharp definitions, and minute analysis of individual propositions—not the skills for which Van Til was known. And his theological language was often very technical as well. Though he could preach the gospel very simply to children and to the childlike, he preferred in his teaching to focus upon the more difficult areas of theo­logical debate. He was not, like C. S. Lewis, a defender of "Mere Christianity." He in­tended to defend the entire Reformed faith down to the smallest detail.

Another facet of Van Til's isolation is that he was a brilliant philosopher in a de­nomination where, for most of his career, no one else was capable of discussing mat­ters at his level (except, perhaps, Gordon H. Clark for a time; but Clark's presence meant more confrontation, not dialogue). Nor was Van Til challenged by book and journal editors, for most of his articles were pub­lished in-house by the seminary's own Westminster Theological Journal, and his books were published by Presbyterian and Reformed, which was equally uncritical of him.

Such isolation may sometimes be neces­sary for the free development of important and controversial theological ideas. How­ever, it creates obvious difficulties. For one thing, an isolated thinker has little opportu­nity to influence theology and the church at large. Thus Van Til is still not taken seri­ously by many people who ought to be very interested in what he had to say (e.g., the new Reformed-epistemology movement of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff).

Another result of the isolation was that Van Til was not effectively challenged dur­ing his career to define his terms, to explain the logical structure of his arguments, to examine his ambiguities. That kind of analysis now falls to others. Some years ago I reviewed a book that was friendly to Van Til, but that frequently misunderstood his ideas. I concluded with an exhortation that we supporters of Van Til set higher stan­dards for ourselves. Van Til himself (then retired) wrote a note commending those sentiments, even though he was aware that they could lead to some negative conclu­sions about his teaching. Often he seemed to flee from such analysis; but at some level he probably knew that he had missed some­thing by not having experienced the bene­fits of iron sharpening iron (Prov. 27:17) or of a multitude of counselors (Prov. 11:14; 15:22; 24:6).

Epistemology
The Essence of Knowledge
Nevertheless, for all of Van Til's weak­nesses he is an important thinker indeed— perhaps the most important Christian thinker since John Calvin. That statement (coming from a not uncritical disciple) may at first seem extreme. To appreciate it, one must come to understand Van Til's contri­bution to contemporary theology.

Now to say that Van Til is the most im­portant Christian thinker since Calvin is not to say that he is the most comprehensive thinker, or the clearest. Certainly it not to say (as some of his more fanatical followers assume) that he is beyond criticisim. Nor is it to say that he has had a greater impact on present-day Christian thought than anybody else; indeed, his isolation continues, and his influence remains small. It is, rather, to say that he has made the Christian community aware of the only epistemology that is appropriate for it, thus laying a necessary foundation for all subsequent Christian reflection.

In describing his theory of knowledg Van Til wrote, "Now the basic structure my thought is very simple,"23 and in essence it is. It is, one might say, the opposite of the secular philosopher Immanuel Kant's view and of the modern thought that follows his lead. Although Kant professed a kind of theism and an admiration for Jesus, he was clearly far from orthodox Christianity. Indeed, his major book on religion (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone) has as its chief theme that the human mind must never subject itself to any authority beyond itself. Kant radically rejected the idea of authoritative revelation from God and asserted the autonomy of the human mind perhaps more clearly than had ever been done before (though secular philosophers had always maintained this notion). The human mind is to be its own supreme authority, its own criterion of truth an right.

In other words, Kant argues that what makes our experience intelligible is largely; perhaps entirely, our own minds. We do not know what the world is really like; we know only how it appears to us, and how it appears to us is largely what we make it out to be. Thus not only is the human mind its own ultimate authority, but it also replaces God as the intelligent planner and creator of the experienced universe. Kant also regarded the human mind as the author of its own moral standards.

Kant is widely regarded as the most important philosopher of the modern period, for he showed the modern human, the secular, would-be-autonomous individual, what one would have to believe about knowledge and the world in order to be consis­tent with this presumed autonomy. In other words, he made the modern secular man epistemologically self-conscious. If modern individuals are not to bow to God, they must bow before themselves, and be Kantians.

If Kant taught secular unbelievers the essentials of their (until then subconscious) theory of knowledge, Van Til did the same for the Christian. While Kant said that we must completely avoid bowing before an external authority, Van Til taught that the only way to find truth is to bow before God's authoritative Scripture. This is Van Til's distinctive contribution to modern theology. Because of Van Til, we can at last define the essential philosophical differ­ences between the Christian and the non-Christian worldviews.

For Van Til, God is the Creator, the world is his creature. Over and over again in class Van Til would draw two circles on the blackboard: a large circle representing God and a smaller circle below represent­ing the creation. He insisted that Christian­ity has a "two-circle" worldview, as opposed to the "one-circle" worldview of secular thought. Secular thought makes all reality equal. If there is a god, he is equal to the world. But in Christianity God is the su­preme Creator and therefore the supreme authority over all human thought. Kant told us to ignore the demands of any alleged revelation external to ourselves. Van Til tells us that the very essence of knowledge is to bring our thoughts into agreement with God's revealed Word.

Thinking God's thoughts after him is to be the rule not only in narrowly religious matters, but in every sphere of human life. (Here Van Til displays his Kuyperian heri­tage.) Studies in history, science, psychol­ogy, sociology, literary criticism; human activities such as business, sports, family life, worship, politics—every thought must be brought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). Van Til supported Christian schools, for he considered it of first importance that children be taught all subjects from a biblical point of view. Not that Scripture teaches the details of plumb­ing or auto repair, but it "speaks of everything" at least in general terms. It teaches the fundamental values that must govern even gardening and boat mainte­nance.

The essence of Van Til's message is that God calls us to "presuppose" him in all our thinking.25 This means that we must regard his revealed truth as more important and more certain than any other, and find in it the norms or criteria that all other knowl­edge must meet. No Christian can find fault with this message. Yet all of us must admit that we need to take it more seriously. So often what passes for Christian thought is secular ideas dressed up with a few biblical quotes taken out of context. We need to be far more conscious of Christ's lordship over all, so that (injurious though this may be to our pride) we will be more interested in what God's Word says than in what any sec­ular thinker has to say.

The Effects of the Fall on Knowledge
Complications begin to set in when Van Til attempts to take into account the fall of humankind in Adam and the doctrine of sin. According to that biblical teaching, we are from conception (Ps. 51:5) guilty of Ad­am's first sin and bearers of a sinful nature (Rom. 3:10-18). In the Reformed doctrine of total depravity, fallen humans are wicked in all thoughts, words, and deeds (Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Isa. 64:6). Only the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ can enable us to do any­thing good. Therefore those without Chris­tian faith are utterly unable to please God (Rom. 8:7-8).

The fall means that all our decisions and actions are directed against God rather than motivated by the desire to glorify him. Thinking is one of those actions. Just as there is godly thinking, trying to think God's thoughts after him, so, as a conse­quence of the fall, there is universal un­godly thinking, rejecting God's revelation and seeking to oppose his plan for us. Hence the biblical antithesis between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God (the Book of Proverbs; 1 Cor. 1:18-2:16).

Van Til is fond of quoting the description of unbelievers that is found in Romans 1. He emphasizes that because of the clarity of God's revelation (w. 18-20) unbelievers know God (w. 20-21). However, they re­ject, in some sense, the knowledge they have. They do not glorify God or give thanks (v. 21), but become fools (v. 22) and exchange the glory of God for idolatry (v. 23), leading to even worse moral degrada­tion (w. 24, 26-31). So they have ex­changed the truth for a lie (v. 25). Neverthe­less, they continue to know God's law (v. 32), and that increases their responsibility.

Unbelievers, then, know God (Rom. 1:21), but in some sense do not know God (1 Cor. 2:14). They reject the knowledge they have. This paradox makes it difficult to characterize the unbelievers' mentality fully. Van Til, somewhat uncharacteristi­cally, admits that this is a "very compli­cated" matter, a "difficult point."26 Perhaps he should have left it at that. But he goes on to characterize unbelievers in various ways which are neither adequate to the biblical data nor consistent with one another.

Van Til often seems to insist that the un­believer has no true knowledge at all, and thus there can be nothing on which the believer can and should agree with the un­believer:

The natural man cannot will to do God's will. He cannot even know what the good is. It will be quite impossible to find a com­mon area of knowledge between believers and unbelievers unless there is agreement between them as to the nature of man himself. But there is no such agreement. But without the light of Christianity it is as little possible for man to have the correct view about himself and the world as it is to have the true view about God.27

This is a frequent theme in Van Til. If it were really true, it would seem that there can be no communication between believer and unbeliever, no common ground for apologetic discussion, and it would be im­possible to maintain the apostle Paul's con­viction that the unbeliever still knows God in some sense. Elsewhere, however, Van Til vehemently rejects the apparent meaning of these statements: "[I have] never denied that the unbeliever has true knowledge," he says with some sense of frustration.28

At this point the reader may well be thor­oughly perplexed and ask, What kind of knowledge do unbelievers then have? Often Van Til characterizes their knowledge as "formal."29 That is to say, unbelievers for­mulate sentences that sound true, but whose meaning differs from the usual in such a way that they are actually rendered false. That, however, would not normally be considered a form of knowledge, but an odd sort of ignorance. Doubtless, unbeliev­ers sometimes engage in such language dis­tortion as part of their rebellion against God, but surely not everything they say has this character. When unbelievers say, "Washington is the capital of the United States," they certainly are not talking about Peoria. Besides, Van Til himself often characterizes unbelieving thought as true in more than a formal sense. He describes idealist ethics as "lofty"30 and Plato's god as noble."31 He insists, too, that unbelievers' lowledge is not a mere potentiality but actual.32 This would not be the case if their knowledge were purely formal. Van Til describes the unbelievers' knowledge in many other ways. It is, for instance, merely intellectual understanding without a moral stance. But elsewhere he admits that this is an artificial distinction, for we cannot separate our logical powers from our moral powers.34 He says sometimes that unbelievers are wrong on basics but often right on incidentals, but then he also says that unbelievers (like the devils in James 2:19) can confess God and even accept an argument for his existence — hardly incidental matters. Sometimes he suggests that the unbelievers' knowledge is subconscious,37 but that sounds more like sigmund Freud than Van Til. Besides, Van Til warns us elsewhere not to make too much of the distinction between uncon­scious and self-conscious action. Clearly in Scripture devils and unbelievers con­sciously make true statements.

Van Til's most characteristic explanation is that unbelievers disagree with believers most often when they are "epistemologically self-conscious," that is, when they are most aware of trying to formulate and act out the implications of their unbelief.39 This is true as a general empirical observa­tion, but there is no biblical principle that requires us to accept it as some kind of rigid mathematical proportion. For all of Satan's epistemological self-consciousness, he does manage occasionally to utter true state­ments—for his own purposes, of course.

It is difficult to make sense out of all this. Clearly we need to go back to the drawing board. The solution may be something like this: The depravity of unbelievers leads them to use their knowledge against God, but it does not always or necessarily lead them to make false statements as such. Of­ten, of course, unbelief will result in false beliefs and statements; but it may also re­sult in a misuse of true ones. Of course, to rebel in this way against a God who is known to have all power and infinite love is in itself an unintelligent act; thus depravity always does affect the intellect, as Van Til says. But the concrete effects are not at all as evident to us or as predictable as Van Til sometimes seems to think. Accordingly, Christian apologists do not need to be em­barrassed when they find themselves agree­ing with unbelievers about something. Con­trary to Van Til, a biblical apologetic need not exclude common notions or ideas, but may legitimately draw conclusions from them.

Apologetics
Traditionally, apologists have developed their defense of Christianity in two steps: (1) a philosophical argument (or argu­ments) for the existence of God; and (2) his­torical arguments for the truth of the New Testament, which usually focus on proph­ecy and miracle (especially the resurrection of Christ). Both these steps have pre­supposed some common ground between the apologist and the unbeliever. Argu­ments for the existence of God typically re­quire initial agreement on the meaning of terms like "cause," "purpose," and "being." The historical arguments usually require some initial agreement on what is histori­cally possible or probable.Van Til objects to this traditional ap­proach because it assumes common notions between believer and unbeliever. As we have seen, that criticism is flawed. But Van Til has further objections: (1) the tradi­tional method seems to assume that we can understand the meaning of "cause," "pur­pose," and "being" without presupposing God; and (2) at best it yields only a god who is in some degree possible or probable, not the God of Scripture who is the standard of all possibility.

Objection (1) seems to be gratuitous. An apologist using the traditional method may very well presuppose that God is the author of cause and purpose, and that they are un­intelligible apart from him; indeed, the apologist may be using the traditional argu­ments to establish that very belief. But hav­ing that presupposition in no way prevents the apologist from discussing "cause" be­fore discussing God. As for objection (2), Van Til does teach that the evidence for God is "absolutely valid" rather than "merely probable."40 But he also admits that our formulation of the argument may not be as cogent as the evidence itself.41 To say that the argument is "merely probable" is not to say that the evidence for God is "merely probable"; rather, it is to confess honestly that our argument has not at­tained the level of cogency which God has placed in the evidence itself. Argument and evidence must be more carefully distin­guished.

What does Van Til propose to put in the place of the traditional method? Some­times he suggests a "presuppositional" form of the traditional method: (1) formu­late proofs for the existence of God in which the theistic presuppositions regard­ing "cause," "purpose," and "being" are set forth explicitly;42 and then (2) present his­torical arguments using the biblical crite­ria for historical possibility, probability, and truth.43 The circularity involved in invoking biblical criteria to prove their own validity is really the same circularity in­volved in any argument for a supreme cri­terion of truth, whether in Christianity or rationalism or some other worldview. To prove that human reason is the supreme authority, we must use human reason; in order to prove that God's revelation is su­preme, we must appeal to God's revelation. If the unbeliever objects to accepting our biblical criteria, we will use them anyway, just as we would reason with mental pa­tients who have constructed their own dreamworld. In that case we do not reason on the basis of their false worldview, nor on some neutral position, but on the basis of our own worldview, which we know to be true.

More often, Van Til suggests an indirect method in which the believer accepts the unbeliever's position for argument's sake in order to show that no intelligible thought is possible on the presuppositions of un­belief. He proves that thesis by showing that the only genuine alternatives to Chris­tianity are (1) systems of logic which seek to unify reality, but cannot account for everything in the real world; and (2) the view that attributes everything to pure chance, which destroys the possibility of any unity or rational explanation. Van Til observes that unbelief necessarily drives people in one of these two directions, or to an unstable compromise between them. By contrast, the unique doctrine of the Trinity (God and therefore the world are equally one and many) keeps Christians from the dilemma of having to choose (1) or (2). Van Til uses many ingenious examples from the history of philosophy and theology to but­tress this point. We have much to learn from Van Til, but must reject the claim that his suggested method must replace every­thing that was done by the more traditional apologists. Rather, we should focus on his development of an epistemology that can serve as a basis for what the traditional apologists have sought to do.

Much more can be said about Van Til's contributions: his analysis of modern phi­losophy, science, and theology, as well as the peculiar emphases in his work as a sys­tematic theologian (e.g., common grace as "earlier grace," God as three persons and one person, Reformed theology as what must be true if God is to be God). But space does not permit.

Legacy
Van Til's ideas are being taught by vari­ous individuals and groups today. The "theonomists" or Christian reconstructionists (e.g., Rousas J. Rushdoony) are thorough­going Van Tillians in their epistemology. Van Til himself never accepted their thesis that the details of the Old Testament law are to be applied to contemporary civil governments, but he did appreciate their support. Among them, Greg L. Bahnsen es­pecially perpetuates Van Til's interests, em­phases, and distinctive methods. Some, such as Gary North, have mounted criti­cisms of Van Til's amillennial eschatology, even though Van Til himself had almost no interest in the subject.46

Francis Schaeffer studied both with Van Til and with J. Oliver Buswell, and his apol­ogetics incorporated elements from both. His emphasis on the Trinity as the solution to the "one and many" problem, for exam­ple, came from Van Til, as did much of his critique of culture. The L'Abri community continues, therefore, to perpetuate much of Van Til's work, even though Van Til himself was highly critical of Schaeffer.

Robert D. Knudsen, Van Til's immediate successor at Westminster Seminary, is a Dooyeweerdian who maintains a number of Van Tillian emphases, including Van Til's high doctrine of Scripture. William Edgar, who also teaches apologetics there, is influenced by both Van Til and Schaeffer. For some reason, most of those today who know Van Til's work are either totally opposed to him or uncritically devoted to him (lambasting anyone they think is not a simon-pure Van Tillian).47 The failure of Van Til to encourage critical analysis of his work may lie behind this phenomenon. It is our hope that the evaluation of his thought will from now on rest with critical disciples rather than with the debunkers or slavish followers.

Notes
1. The biographical information in this article is (except for some items of personal knowledge) taken from William White, Jr., Van Til: Defender of the Faith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1979). This book is an ex­cellent introduction to Van Til's life and character, but it has weaknesses, especially in explaining his thought; see John M. Frame, review of Van Til: De­fender of the Faith, by William White, Jr., Westminster TheologicalJoumal 42.1 (Fall 1979): 198-203.

2. Princeton University and Princeton Seminary have always been distinct institutions.

3. Only a large part of volume 2 has been trans­lated into English—Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God, trans. and ed. William Hendriksen (Grand Rap­ids: Baker, 1977).

4. See especially Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1964) and Christian Theistic Ethics (Phila­delphia: Westminster Theological Seminary, 1958).

5. In my judgment, Machen's Christianity and Lib­eralism (New York: Macmillan, 1923) remains to this day the best presentation of this theme.

6. This should not be confused with the Presbyte­rian Church in America, which was founded in 1973 and still bears that name.

7. Van Til's Christian Reformed colleague at West­minster, R. B. Kuiper, also joined the Orthodox Pres­byterian Church in 1936, but he returned to the Chris­tian Reformed Church later when he became president of Calvin Seminary.

8. Cornelius Van Til, The New Modernism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1946).

9. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory ofKnowledge (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1969), 229.

10. Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace (Philadel­phia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1947). This volume was later reissued as the first section of Common Grace and the Gospel (1964).

11. Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1955). A revised and abridged edition was issued in 1963. Un­less there is indication to the contrary, future refer­ences to this work have the 1963 edition in view.

12. James Daane, A Theology of Grace (Grand Rap­ids: Eerdmans, 1954).

13. Cornelius Van Til, Christianity and Barthian­ism (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962).

14. This "unpublished" business was something of a joke among students. The books were, in fact, avail­able to all; they were sold by mail-order companies and in bookstores. Still, Van Til remained rather mod­est about these syllabi and insisted on labeling them "unpublished."

15. For a complete bibliography of Van Til's works up to 1971, see Jerusalem and Athens, ed. E. R. Geehan (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1971), 492-98.

16. Cornelius Van Til, Why I Believe in God (Phila­delphia: Committee on Christian Education, Ortho­dox Presbyterian Church, 1966).

17.Van Til, Defense, 74.

18. Ibid., 102.

19. Ibid., 77, 231.

20. Ibid., 94.

21. Almost all of the published criticism of Van Til falls into this category. That includes most of the neg­ative articles in Jerusalem and Athens, ed. Geehan, as well as R. C. Sproul, John H. Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zonder-van, 1984); see John M. Frame, review of Classical Apologetics, by R. C. Sproul et al., Westminster Theo­logical Journal 47.2 (Fall 1985): 279-99. The same must be said of those who published critiques in the 1950s—Buswell, Daane, and the Calvin Forum group. As for misunderstandings by Van Til's friends, see Jim Halsey, "A Preliminary Critique," Westminster Theo­logical Journal 39.1 (Fall 1976): 120-36, and the reply in John M. Frame, Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987), esp. 38-39, 51-52. Also note Frame, review of Van Til, by William White, Jr., and the interchange with White and others in Journey 3.2 (March-April 1988): 9-11; 3.4-5 (July-Oct. 1988): 45-46; and 4.1 (Jan.-Feb. ): 14-15, 22-23.

22. Space does not permit a full discussion here of this controversy within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. See Frame, Knowledge of God, 21-40. Neither Van Til nor Clark was at his best in the debate, and the controversy (on rather technical philosophical mat­ters which few actually understood) detracted much from the work of the gospel in the little denomination and at Westminster Seminary.

23. Van Til, Defense, 1955 ed., 23.

24. Van Til, Defense, 8.

25. Van Til is often called a "presuppositionalist." Unlike Gordon Clark, Van Til rarely used that term to describe himself. When he did, it was in deference to someone else's description of him (e.g., J. Oliver Buswell—see Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge, 276; see also 258). Furthermore, as far as I know, Van Til himself never defined "presupposition."

26. Van Til, Defense, 50; Cornelius Van Til, Intro­duction to Systematic Theology (Nutley, N.J.: Presbyte­rian and Reformed, 1974), 25-26, 78.

27. Van Til, Defense, 54, 67, 73. I have about fifty more quotations to this effect in my notes! And they are taken from only six of his books.

28. Van Til, Defense, 1955 ed., 285.

29. Van Til, Defense, 59, 74, 77, 106, 206, etc.

30. Ibid., 63.

31. Van Til, Introduction, 107.

32. Van Til, Defense, 156.

33. Ibid., 17, 301.

34. Van Til, Introduction, 92.

35. Van Til, Defense, 83; Introduction, 32,

36. Van Til, Defense, 175; Introduction, 197.

37. Van Til, Defense, 98; see also 94, 173, 231.

38. Van Til, Introduction, 90.

39. Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, 5, 84, 151.40. Van Til, Defense, 103-4.

41. Van Til, Defense, 200; Christian Theory of Knowledge, 289.

42. Van Til, Defense, 201; Introduction, 199.

43. Van Til, Defense, 202, 207; Introduction, 147.

44. Van Til, Defense, 100; Christian Theory of Knowledge, 18.

45. Van Til characterizes his own work this way in Defense, 146.

46. Van Til's Common Grace and the Gospel does develop a theory that wickedness becomes worse and worse over the course of history. Like North, I do not find this theory to be biblical.

47. For examples see Journey 3.2 (March-April 1988): 9-11; 3.4-5 (July-Oct. 1988): 45-46; and 4.1 (Jan.-Feb. 1989): 14-15, 22-23.