Van Til, part 1 (Disk 21)
Cornelius Van Til born 1895 (MY NOTE:
As of this recording, Knudsen states that Van Til was still living
and a frequent visitor to the campus).
As he undertook his attempt to develop
a consistently Biblical and Reformed apologetic and found
(initially) a welcome ally in the Christian philosophy developed by
Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd (MY NOTE: Van Til would later become
critical of the philosophy school, but that will be covered later).
Early on his name appeared alongside
Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Stoker, etc. in the Philosophie
Reformata.
MY NOTE: Here bio information is given
on Van Til. This can be found other places on his education
credentials.
1928 – 1929 he was an instructor of
Apologetics at Princeton Theological Seminary.
From 1929 he was professor of
Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary.
The development of Van Til's
apologetics is based upon his criticism of Idealism (the topic of his
doctoral dissertation). The central idea of his thought is that of
analogy.
Van Til has sought to carry on Kuyper's
work of bringing the kingship of Jesus Christ should come to
expression in every area of life. The sovereignty of God is central
(along with the others in the school) and radical.
He assumed a double stance to idealism.
Here is where Van Til is different. Van Til was faced with a
situation where he heard that Christianity and Idealism were unified
in their opposition to pragmatism and advocated a view of God and the
absolute of idealism was really a better expression of the Christian
idea of God. Van Til's position was that the God of Christianity did
not square with Idealism.
Van Til did appreciate the concrete
approach of absolute idealism where everything refers back to an
ultimate starting point. Van Til's method is Transcendental. Van
Til concluded that the starting point of idealism was a false one.
Idealists after Kant understood that it
was necessary to view the facts under an ultimate principle of
interpretation and attempted to go beyond Kant to overcome brute,
uninterpreted facts still remaining in the thing in its self (Ding
an sich). They attempted to avoid uniting the facts of our sense
experience and abstract principle of unity in an external fashion.
An attempt was made to arise to a new height to discover a concrete
absolute with a reconciliation of fact and logic. Hegel went to the
extreme of introducing time into logic.
Van Til was asking is this absolute of
the idealist is it really an improvement on the Christian idea of
God? The idealists have more of an eminence of God over against the
Christian view. Van Til insisted that this absolute had been
developed to overcome the split between facts and logic, you're
idealists principle is in effect abstract. The idealists has the
notion that he has to be able to get an idea of the essence of
something before he can use it as a principle of interpretation. If
he is going to use God as a principle, then he must have penetrated
into the essence of God and define who God is. Van Til regards that
as an expression of the autonomy of thought and under such a scheme
the only God you can get a hold of is an extension of your own
experience. This is a characteristic of idealism that Van Til wants
to avoid, the autonomy of man where he denies the creator/creature
distinction.
In Van Til's intent there is a
scriptural idea that he wants to make foremost. There is the idea of
God and Cosmos and the boundary between them. Van Til expresses a
thought that is extremely Calvinistic, you cannot grasp in your
thought the essence of God or God as he is in himself and you must be
content with God as he has reveled himself in revelation.
If instead of truly being the concrete
absolute union of principle and sense experience (fact and logic),
the concrete absolute is not really concrete and so there is always a
residue of brute fact and so there is a contingency that remains and
that in idealism there is a direct road to pragmatism where all
reality is confusion and brute fact rules and unity is not possible.
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