Swallowing the Elephant August 12, 2008
Posted by gloryseed in Book Reviews.trackback
A Review of Christian Apologetics, by Cornelius Van Til
Reviewed by C.R. Wiley
There’s an old quip that goes, “How do you eat an elephant?” When you receive a puzzled look you finish, “Why, one bite at a time, of course.”
The quip is usually employed when some monstrously large task must be performed – such as building a bridge or writing a book. And it is a useful quip, encouraging one to get started. But it is interesting to note that it is often used when someone is speaking of creating something, not actually ingesting anything. For to eat an elephant is to destroy the elephant. It is not reassembled once eaten. If you want an elephant to remain an elephant you must take it whole.
What’s Wrong with Living in a “Block-House”?
That appetizing picture I believe pretty well summarizes one of Cornelius Van Til’s more important insights for Christian apologetics. Christianity must be received whole, not piece-meal. For piece-meal Christianity is not Christianity at all. It is a body of truth – not, as he says, a “Block-House” founded on more fundamental truths. We shouldn’t seek to first establish the truth of theism and only then proceed to build the truth of the Christian concept of God on top of it. The only God is the triune God of Christianity. God generically understood is no God at all. It is a falsehood, for such a God does not exist.
Van Til justifiably dedicates a considerable amount of ink to an exploration of the metaphysic behind what he calls “direct apologetics.” That’s the apologetics responsible for the “block-house” methodology he finds so objectionable. It is based on the premise that reason is a sort of neutral country located somewhere between theism and atheism, sort of like Switzerland in World War II. There theists and atheists can meet and discuss their differences and perhaps win each other over without bloodshed.
His analysis is dense and technical but in the end he attributes the discovery of this neutral ground by Roman Catholics and Arminians to their need for ontological space. Because the sovereign God of the Bible threatens their notions of free will and responsibility they sequester Him to make room for themselves. When they do that, lo and behold, they discover a whole city of unbelievers has appeared around them! Who would have known that those folks felt the same need to put God in a box?
Obviously, according to Van Til, no such country exists except in the minds of those who claim to live there.
The Problem of Entry.
If Christianity is a fully self-contained system, how does one enter it? Are there any doors? How about windows? If it can’t be broken down into more fundamental concepts accessible to reason, then can we at least open the circle and lay it out sequentially? Turn it into, say, an elephant sized plate of spaghetti made up of a single noodle? If so, how much of it must one eat before one can be called a Christian? And if we did that, how would we get someone to start eating? What reasons could we provide?
What makes Van Til so delightful to his admirers and so frustrating to his detractors is his claim that, with regard to the operations of unaided reason, “You can’t get there from here.” Theoretical reason, when it is based on a false metaphysic, and practical reason, when it is based on a false epistemology, both leave us where we started – which is to say, in the dark.
All the operations of reason are tethered to something. And since sinners are at their core committed to autonomy, their reason is always employed in the service of furthering that autonomy.
Revelation to the Rescue!
But there is a witness and it is revelation. Please don’t groan. We’re not talking about the nonsensical ravings of lunatics, nor are we even limiting ourselves to the Bible. For although it is found most fully and authoritatively in scripture, it is also found in nature, and most importantly in human nature. There is still a place for reason. She may not be divine, as the Jacobins said, but she ain’t chopped-liver either.
Van Til is at his best when discussing natural revelation. Those pages dedicated to it are by far the best in the book. I highlighted nearly the entire section. Who said the Reformed don’t do Natural Theology? Only when he addresses the revelatory power of the Imago Dei in his chapter, “The Point of Contact,” does he speak with the same elan.
Here are some choice snippets to ponder.
“Man was created as an analogue of God; his thinking, his willing, and his doing is therefore properly conceived as at every point analogical to the thinking, willing, and doing of God. It is only after refusing to be analogous to God that man can think of setting a contrast between the attitude of reason to the one type of revelation and the attitude of faith to another type of revelation.”
“Now if man’s whole consciousness was originally created perfect, and as such authoritatively expressive of the will of God, that same consciousness is still revelational and authoritative after the entrance of sin to the extent that it is still the voice of God. The sinner’s efforts, so far as they are done self-consciously from his point of view, seek to destroy or bury the voice of God that comes to him through nature, which includes his own consciousness. But this effort cannot be wholly successful at any point in history. The most depraved men cannot wholly escape the voice of God.”
“It is quite true, of course, that created man is unable to penetrate to the very bottom of this inherently clear revelation. But this does not mean that on this account the revelation of God is not clear, . . .. Man does not need to know exhaustively in order to know truly and certainly.”
Rather than go on, I’ll just let you read the book for yourself.
But What About the Elephant?
We’re back to the problem of the elephant. If revelation is the only source of truth, and revelation is received by faith, is there any place for reason? Are apologetics swallowed up by preaching?
It turns out for Van Til that you don’t really need to swallow the elephant after all. You’ve already got an elephant living inside you – you’re born with it by virtue of your humanity. And what is true for you is true for everyone descended from our first parents. We’re all born with the image of God in us.
Because sin also lives in us, we find life with the elephant terribly uncomfortable. We wish the elephant would just go away. Since we can’t get rid of the elephant, we pretend he’s not there. That’s what the Apostle Paul refers to as “suppressing the truth.” With practice you can get pretty good at it.
It’s the elephant that provides us with our point of contact with unbelievers. We don’t need so-called “neutral ground” to talk intelligently with them, what we need to do is point them to the presuppositions they’re suppressing. Of course, sinful presuppositions stand in the way, and those need to be cleared away. It is this approach of addressing the presuppositions that stand prior to reason that earned Van Til’s apologetics the name Presuppositionalism. It turns out that reason has plenty to keep itself busy with this handy task.
None of this should catch us by surprise. The basic outlines of it are in Plato. This brings up something I have a small gripe about with Van Til. I wish he would have come clean about his Platonism. He does speak of Plato, but he fails to admit the basic similarities between the structure of his thought and that of the father of Philosophy. We shouldn’t be embarrassed by our debt to the old Greek.
The beauty of it is we can recover some very rich resources, one of them being the word “education.” The word means, “to draw out.” Education doesn’t add things. It doesn’t make us eat elephants. It draws things out. It helps us discover the elephants inside of us.
How does this all work on a practical level? Well, it wouldn’t hurt to read Plato’s dialogues, particularly Meno. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meno But if you want to see it done by a Christian in the contemporary context, read, The Reason for God, by Tim Keller. No time for a treatment of it here. I’m already way over my word limit. Look for a review of it in the days ahead.
By the way, I’ve got other gripes with Van Til. But I’ll get to those another time.
C.R.
gloryseed
Mortimus
Since I have not read Van Til I have a couple of questions:
1) If Van Til is arguing for classical apologetics are your issues with Van Til related to classical apologetics or his views which are evident in his presentation of classical apologetics? In other words has he accurately presented classical apologetics and you are responding to this or has he brought in some of his own ideologies and this is what you are having an issue with?
2) Also since I am not well versed in Plato let’s assume Plato became a Christian. So if Plato was a Christian what school of apologetics do you believe he might favor? Based on this which Platonian views seem to match up to this school of apologetics?
Rick
Rick,
I’ll answer your first question and get back to you on the second. I’m currently working through Van Til’s: The Defense of the Faith and I’ll do a review of that in the days ahead. But here’s a quote from that book that I think is illuminating.
“As pointed out before, Roman Catholic theology is built up from pre-fabricated sections. The first story is built by reason. Christians and non-Christians first together build a natural theology that a god very probably exists.
“The second story is built by evangelical Protestants. They hold to the Bible but still retain the idea of the autonomy of reason to some extent.
“The third story is built by Calvinists, who add their ‘five points’ to the doctrine they share with the Romanists (theism) and to the doctrines they share with the evangelicals against sacerdotalism ….
(drop down a few paragraphs)
“Now the question is whether we are to have a theory of common grace that will fit in with the scholastic type of natural theology …, or whether we shall have a theory of common grace that fits naturally into the system of truth called the Reformed Faith.” pp. 171 & 172, Fourth Edition.
That lengthy quote demonstrates two things. First, that Van Til thought that classical apologetics was shaped by pagan, Catholic and Arminian presuppositions. And second, that an approach was needed more in keeping with the Reformed Faith.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this in my review. (I think he makes some good points and I’m sympthetic to his project — for reasons he might disapprove of ironically — but I also think he had some blind spots that need to be owned by his followers.)
C.R.
“As a graduate student, Van Til read Plato’s writings in the original Greek. As brilliant a thinker as Plato was, according to Van Til, if this would-be autonomous man could not develop a cogent and coherent theory of knowledge, there would be few (if any) who could improve on his effort.” (Greg Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, p. 318)
I’m fairly sure Van Til would argue that the ‘basic outlines of it’ (his apologetic) are in scripture
. In the same work Bahnsen mentions that “Van Til was particularly distressed at the end of his life that he had never produced an exegetical study showing the extensive and necessary biblical support for the presuppositional method (preface, xviii). When you mention the debt to Plato, do you mean that Van Til constructed his method on Plato, or that Van Til’s exposure to Plato enabled him to recognise a method already revealed in scripture? Apologies if I’m not phrasing it clearly! Do you feel Van Til could of reached his views strictly from scripture (e.g. http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pa045.htm)?
I really enjoyed the review, it’s rare to find such a clear explanation of Van Til’s apologetics, I’m looking forward to reading about your “other gripes” and views on Keller’s book.
Antonio R.
Rick,
To your second question. I’m afraid that answering it would make me guilty of an anachronism. Nevertheless, I’ll try to address the matter in a different way.
Van Til fought the accusation that he was an Idealist. I don’t mean that he had a sunny disposition; I’m talking about the Idealist school in philosophy — Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, inter alia. That stung him for two reasons: first, because he was adamant that he was simply a Reformed thinker doing apologetics, and second, because he obviously was working with Idealist categories.
Anyone with a background in philosophy would pick up on his Idealism pretty quickly. His use of terms like “transcendental” “a-priori” and “a-posteriori” are give a ways, but the structure of his thought is continental rationalism through and through. He denied it strongly, but he confused source material with structure. When he was accused of being a rationalist he would point to the Bible and the Reformed tradition and say, “These are my sources!” But most people who think about these things think that that is the very thing a Christian in the rationalist tradition would say.
Now in the history of philosophy there are three broad traditions: the rational, the empirical, and the skeptical. The basic approach of each is described as follows: inward, outward, and we make it up as we go along. The fountain head of the rational is Plato. That’s why I said he had a Platonic structure — particularly to his epistemology. His correspondence theory of truth – the analogical understanding (his term) and his use of the imago dei for the classical (pre-Christian) logos of ancient philosophy –these tell the tale.
I’ll have more to say in my next review.
Antonio (Kindofdaily),
Good to hear from you! Thanks for the post. Thanks for the compliment too.
Before I respond I want to say a couple of things. First, when I say I have gripes, that doesn’t mean I don’t like Van Til. I like a lot of what he said. I have gripes with my wife, and I think she’s great. At some point I’m going to post some of the things I like about the good professor (meant in both senses). Second, I think my critiques are secondary and tertiary in nature — not directed at the heart of his project.
Reading Van Til, it is obvious that he was deeply learned and that he was fully conversant with the Western philosophical tradition. My guess is he resonated much more deeply with the rationalist tradition. I think all Reformed people do. I also think he adopted language and categories that he felt were congruent with the structure of Biblical revelation. How he understood that congruence, I’ve not seen him address. I’m just beginning to study him. My thought is that this is fine — common grace should be understood behind that congruence in some way.
My critique, simply put, is summed up thusly: if Van Til had never read deeply in the Western Tradition, he wouldn’t have read his Bible the way he did, or used the categories he employed. He should have come clean and explained himself. If he did, I’d like to see it. I’d be glad to know it.
C.R.
Thanks for fielding my questions. Your critique is exactly the reason for my line of questioning. You stated, “if Van Til had never read deeply in the Western Tradition, he wouldn’t have read his Bible the way he did, or used the categories he employed.” A Marxist will read the Bible with Marxist ideologies present and therefore see Marxist ideas contained within it. A good approach to stripping away your ideologies in relating to a text is “Exploring the Texture of Texts” by Vernon K. Robbins. Although I have some issues with Robbins I am sympathetic to the project he has undertaken. A few biblical scholars have taken this approach and have begun to produce richer commentaries on specific books of the New Testament. I believe a similar approach needs to be taken in Apologetics as well. Wouldn’t a better grasp of hermeneutics benefit the apologist?
I assuming your use of the term “continental rationalism” is referring to the movement of adding empirical components to rationalist thought which was rooted in the Enlightenment. My caution is as we approach the written word which exposes the thoughts of the author, we need to be careful how we approach it. You stated in reference to his Idealism, “His use of terms like ‘transcendental’ ‘a-priori’ and ‘a-posteriori’ are give a ways, but the structure of his thought is continental rationalism through and through.” I have seen these terms used where idealism is not present so our focus should be based on the structure of thought primarily as you have identified not on specific terms being used. Bryan Wilson has identified seven worldviews (ie..structures of thought) which are present when we are responding to the world which may help with this. The worldviews he identifies are: the conversionist, revolutionist, introversionist, gnostic-manipulationist, thaumaturgical, reformist and utopian. Doesn’t a better understanding of who we are when approaching the text and who the author is help us to strip out thought processes and better understand the intended meaning?
I am glad you qualified your “gripes.” We need to separate primary concerns which may be foundational and lead towards alternative mental models (which have theological implications) from secondary and tertiary which are more cautionary in nature but also need to be challenged. The key here is to directly challenge thoughts, ideas, etc. and not directly attack a person. I think you have done this graciously so I look forward to hearing of areas where you are in agreement with Van Til. One of the more popular classical apologists of today is William Lane Craig. He sees classical apologetics as answering the distinction between knowing Christianity to be true and showing Christianity to be true which is a bridge of natural theology and Christian evidences. This approach is rooted in Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways and according to Craig has been confirmed by the recent work of Alvin Plantinga. I do not see Craig’s explanation of classical apologetics any different than the term you used “continental rationalism.” This seems to point to a consistent structure of thought for this school of apologetics. To Antonio’s point that Van Til would argue that the basic outlines of his classical apologetic are based in scripture this is the argument of the evidential, cumulative case, presuppositional, fideist and reformed epistemological schools as well. Based on this I am having trouble aligning perfectly with any one of these schools. This is not the presence of Sketicism because I am in agreement with some of these schools but a realization that a “true” reformed apologetic may not exist in any one of these schools.
Rick
Hi Rick,
Thanks for the post. Here are a few of thoughts.
First, I want to clarify something: when I said that Van Til was well read in the Western Tradition and that shaped his questioning of the Bible; I meant that as a compliment. I think that one of the great contributions of Western philosophy to the world has been that it has taught mankind how to think. It has given us the categories of thought that make intellectual progress possible.
Within the history of Christianity there has been a long and rich interweaving of philosophical inquiry and Biblical revelation. The two primary expressions of this in the Western Church are Augustinianism and Thomism. Augustinianism can be seen as a permutation of the Platonic approach and Thomism is an expression of the Aristotelian. For a wonderful treatment of these see G. K. Chesterton’s, The Dumb Ox – his life of Thomas Aquinas. http://www.amazon.com/Saint-Thomas-Aquinas-Dumb-Ox/dp/0385090021
Now, Reformed people definitely side with Augustine and see the appropriation of Aristotle in the 12 century by Aquinas as a major problem. (Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk and he burned the Summa.)
Concerning my observations about Continental Rationalism, since Reformed theology works within the very broad categories of the Platonic tradition, it is understandable that Van Til would feel a need to interact with Rationalism/Idealism. (They’re also within the Platonic tradition.)
As I continue to read Van Til, I can see that his approach is more a kind of intellectual judo – using the very categories coined by Kant, Leibniz and others to undermine their philosophies. I’ll have more to say on that later. I am just sampling his thought and I’m sure I’m missing some important material. Anyone who reads these posts, please feel free to direct me toward materials that would correct any misunderstandings I have.
Further, it seems to me that the various schools of apologetics appropriate on a kind of ad-hoc basis from Western Philosophy with a kind of pragmatic eye. Van Til, to either his credit, or demerit, tried to develop an internally consistent approach based on first principles. Consequently, he dismissed Aquinas’ five proofs out of hand because of the Aristotelian ontology behind Aquinas’ proofs.
C.R.
Here’s an interesting comment from John Frame that I think is similar to some things I’ve said in a couple of posts.
From: http://www.reformed.org/apologetics/index.html?mainframe=/apologetics/frame_ligonier.html