Happy Birthday to Van Til (and Me)

No.256: May 2, 2025

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Dear Friends,

Tomorrow, May 3rd, is my birthday. The weather has made a wonderful turn for the better. Skies are blue, grass is green, breezes are cool and refreshing. I may try to head out to the river and give myself an opportunity to pray my new Angler’s Prayer.

May 3rd, strangely enough, is also my son-in-law’s birthday.

And May 3rd is Cornelius Van Til’s birthday. Van Til (1895-1987), as you may or may not know, was Professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary for many decades in the 20th century. A brilliant thinker, yet not always clear or easy communicator, he attempted a sort of “Copernican Revolution” in Christian apologetics. That is, he pioneered a “presuppositional” method of apologetics that he believed was more consistent with Reformed theological convictions.

Van Til is beloved by some and reviled by others. It is a testament to the rigor of his thought, as well as its continued relevance, that he remains a lightning rod even at this historical distance. For reasons unknown to me, many people who dismissively think Van Til is a crank, or that he taught obviously silly things about human epistemology (e.g., knowledge of God and the world), nevertheless seem incapable of ignoring him.

It is a dynamic you see on social media quite often. For example, legions of people will deride Jonah Goldberg on X (Twitter), telling him how “irrelevant” he is; to which he wonders, exasperatedly, if I am so irrelevant why do you keeping talking about me? I wonder the same thing. If Van Til is so obviously silly and ridiculous, out of the mainstream of the Reformed Tradition, and so on, the continued interest (obsession?) seems pretty disproportionate to its value and not a great use of time.

On the other hand, I get the sense that his detractors are not content to just disagree and move on because they deeply desire to land some kind of “knockout punch” to Van Til’s way of thinking. I don’t want to overly psychologize people, but I do personally understand the impulse. There are theological ideas for which I have great distaste, and feel it would be salutary if one could just do away with them once and for all. This may be something of what is motivating repeated attempts to discredit him.

In a way, I am somewhat responsible for provoking the very latest chapter of this saga, even though I have little desire to spend my life engaging in skirmishes over apologetic methodology. Last December I laid down my own personal “Apologetic Thermopylae.” I called attention to Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.’s 1995 article in the Westminster Theological Journal on Paul’s epistemology as expressed in 1 Corinthians 2. I simply concluded that I personally would not take seriously Van Til’s detractors unless and until they had proved Gaffin wrong.

Two people have taken up that challenge, one of them in quite fair-minded, if flawed, fashion; the other, a 14,000+ word essay which concludes that “[Gaffin’s] entire article is one long example of begging the question,” which “seriously distorts the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and (less importantly, John Calvin),” and “miss[es] the actual important and amazing points they are making about the Gospel.”

Bold. Let’s just say we shall soon see whether that holds up to scrutiny. Stay tuned.