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.