Sunday, January 19, 2014

Robert D. Knudsen's Calvinistic Philosophy lectures (Disk 21)

This is a continuation of the class lectures on Calvinistic Philosophy given by Robert D. Knudsen at Westminster Theological Seminary.  As before, the information in the audio recordings have not been validated for accuracy (use at your own risk).


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.

No comments: