0:00 REVIEW – Van Til’s Transcendental Argument Is Focused On Worldviews Not On Elements And Concepts In Isolation From Others …
I began by telling you the argument in an apologetical setting that has a transcendental direction is focused on the worldview, not just an element of life or thinking or some concept in isolation from others. We’re looking at entire worldviews. And then, right before the break, I began by saying transcendental reasoning is concrete. It’s not merely formal or abstract.
0:25 Van Til Quote … We are not answering the skeptic with something simply formal or abstract … VT takes issue with Abraham Kuyper. (Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch politician, journalist, statesman, and theologian. He served as prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901-1905. Source: Google Books)
Van Til says in the Defense of the Faith, pages 384 to 385, we are not answering skepticism with something formal or abstract. He says, Kuyper insists that the concept of faith that he here speaks of is without content, without content.
0:45 Greg L. Bahnsen Comments … All Men Operate On Some Type Of Faith … GLB begins to explain why VT takes issue with Kuyper’s “formal faith” or generic faith notion … The Unbeliever with Kuyper’s notion is only being confronted with an abstraction of GOD… The Christian Faith is not abstract or without content …The “I THINK THEREFORE I AM” attempt to know GOD. VT IS UPSET WITH KUYPER FOR BUYING INTO THIS.
The claim is all men operate on some kind of faith. You’ve heard that, right? People think that’s real profound to say. Everybody lives by faith. Everybody has faith in something. But Van Til says, well, he’s going to argue with Kuyper. Kuyper insists the concept of faith he speaks of here is without content. It is inherent in the subject, therefore, not because the subject is unavoidably confronted with God, but simply as such.
Here we’re just talking about faith as such, or if you will, generic faith, abstract faith, rather than faith with particular content or concrete character to it. By means of this purely formal faith, the human subject is first to become conscious of its own existence. Then by means of this formal faith, a bridge is to be laid to the external world. The laws of thought by which the environment of man is to be manipulated also rest on this formal faith.
By formal, Van Til means just the generic idea of faith rather than the substance or content of faith. And by means of a purely formal faith, you have first of all the human subject established. I think therefore I am. You all with me? Just formal faith. I don’t know what I am. I know what kind of being I am, but I must exist formally.
And then by means of this formal faith, a bridge is built to the external world. Here you have the philosopher who’s trying to answer these abstract questions about what is it for me to exist? How can I know objects outside myself? What are they? And so forth. And Van Til is upset with Kuyper for buying into that.
2:28 VT QUOTE – FAITH ALWAYS HAS CONTENT.
And I’m going jump into a sentence. He then says, to be sure, all men have faith. Unbelievers have faith as well as believers. But that is due to the fact that they too are creatures of God. Faith therefore always has content. It is against the content of faith as belief in God that man has become an unbeliever. As such, he tries to suppress the content of his original faith. Original faith is Van Til’s way of saying we all come into this world believing in God and we suppress that. He tries to reduce it to something formal.
3:09 GLB Comments – Philosophers want to abstract GOD so they don’t have to be confronted by HIM.
I think right before the break I was saying, what philosophers want to do is they want to take features of Jehovah God, abstract them from that concrete reality that God is, and talk about them in general and impersonal. So one of the features of Jehovah God is that His Mind is coherent. Everything that He says coheres with everything else He says, and everything He thinks is consistent with everything else He thinks.
And so we should, as Christians, say, I must think, quote unquote, logically, if I would be godly in my thoughts, because Jehovah is like that. I give thanks to Him. I honor His Name. I worship Him when I think logically. Of course, you don’t hear a whole lot of that in philosophy departments, do you? No, what we talk about is what? The abstract laws of logic, the impersonal.
4:04 Cont. The fallout from philosophers using abstraction to avoid GOD…WHERE DO THESE ABSTRACTIONS COME FROM?
And then that raises questions. People will come along eventually and say, well, what are abstract laws of logic? I mean, they don’t exist in rocks and trees and streams and so forth. Where do we find the laws of logic? And then we got to start dealing with metaphysical questions like, where do generalizations and abstractions exist? Somebody like Plato would say, well, there’s a realm beyond time and space. But in all of this, whatever direction you take, you are abstracting being formal in your approach so that what? You don’t have to deal specifically with Jehovah.
4:41 GLB Gives other examples of how people use this generalization approach to avoid GOD’S TRUTH.
If I could change this out of the intellectual sphere into more general life and ethics and general counseling for pastors, there are lots of people, lots of women, who in general will say the notion of submission to the husband is a good one. But submitting to this guy that I’m married to, being concrete about that, now that’s a different matter.
Yeah, but basically that’s the point. The notion of concrete submission is really quite different from the general idea. And there’ll be people who say, well, I love the idea of fatherhood, but I hate my particular father. And that’s because in this case, presumably that father falls short of the ideal. But you’re not real upset if you’re that person who hates your particular father but you love the idea of fatherhood. You’re not real upset. But, when you have to do a lot of research about fatherhood or write articles on fatherhood and so forth. But if you had to write about your own father, your blood pressure would go up, you wouldn’t sleep at night, you wouldn’t enjoy the assignment and so forth and so on.
5:48 Cont. Philosophers are doing the same thing to avoid JEHOVAH … THUS, VT IS SAYING THAT WE HAVE TO CONFRONT THEM WITH JEHOVAH: TAKE THEM FROM THE ABSTRACT TO THE CONCRETE.
In the same way, if I can just limited but by analogy, philosophers want to talk about fatherhood. They want to talk about conceptual adequacy. They want to talk about logic. They want to talk about uniformity. They don’t want to talk about Jehovah. And Van Til saying, we’ve got to force them to see that in all of that, they’re talking about Jehovah.
6:10 GLB – THAT’S WHY VT’S APOLOGETIC IS SO OFFENSIVE … IT’S VERY STRONG PASSIONATE AND RELIGIOUS …
That’s why this apologetic, I think, is offensive to many people. It’s very strong, it’s very passionate, it’s very religious. Van Til saying, you’ve got to be converted. I mean, that’s just, in a philosophy department, that’s just gauche to talk that way. We don’t talk about people needing to be, that’s what you do at a Billy Graham crusade. Here we’re talking about impersonal, abstract things.
6:35 Cont. VT’S TRANSCENDENTAL APPROACH IS CONCRETE, PERSONAL, AND IN YOUR FACE.
Van Til’s transcendental approach, to make my point here, is not an abstract, formal kind of argument. It’s very concrete. We confront the unbeliever with an entire worldview, and it’s personal, and it’s in your face. If you don’t mind me using that expression. Jehovah is confronting you. And if you do not submit to Him, then you will die. Now we’re used to hearing that kind of in preaching, meaning eschatologically, you will die. We’re talking intellectually as apologists. We’re saying, intellectually, you will die if you do not bow to Jehovah. And the way in which we’re demonstrating this is by a transcendental program, reducing the unbeliever’s philosophy to absurdity, showing that no experience is intelligible apart from this very concrete kind of God and worldview that we’re dealing with.
7:29 CLASS COMMENT (Indiscernible Audio) … TRUTH in the abstract? “THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE.”
7:50 GLB RESPONDS – THE TRUTH ABOUT JESUS WILL MAKE MEN FREE, not the truth in the abstract.
Yeah, the truth will make you free. So that’s engraved in the big bricks at the top that surround the building. Other philosophical maxims too. But that’s the one that honors Jesus. The truth will make you free. But of course what Jesus said is, I am the truth. … He said, if you abide in My Word, you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. So Jesus is not talking about truth in the abstract making them free. He’s talking about the specific truth about Him that makes men free. And so here in an attempt to honor Jesus, they actually insult Jesus by generalizing and taking away the concreteness and specificity of what He was getting at.
8:32 VT QUOTES.
Van Til says, we are not being speculative. We’re not interested in finding the highest philosophical concept and then calling it God. That’s from Common Grace, page 8. In Common Grace, page 104, he says, we’re not positing an indeterminate God. You know what an indeterminate God is? Just the formal idea of a God out there of some sort, somewhere. And unspecified, we’re dealing with a very particular kind of God. In fact, he says in the defense of the faith, page 46, also pages 25 to 29, I obviously don’t have time to read all these things. I learned that from our first hour.
9:13 VT QUOTE – THE ISSUE IS THE SPECIFIC KIND OF GOD THAT WE WISH TO PROVE … NOT IF A GOD EXISTS, BUT THE GOD JEHOVAH.
Van Til says in the defense of the faith that the issue between the believer and the unbeliever from an apologetical standpoint is precisely the specific kind of God that we seek to prove. Van Til says most unbelievers are not all that adverse to admitting that a God exists. Isn’t that right? In the same way that somebody who hates his father says, oh, fatherhood is a good idea.
And if you talk to most unbelievers, there are some that are real gnarly, you know, and they just don’t even want to use that language at all. But when all is said and done, most unbelievers say, oh, yeah, well, I think the universe as a whole is God. Yeah, God exists. The whole of reality is bigger than man. So there’s something bigger than man. Call it God. Yes. Yeah, God exists. Well, what kind of challenge is that? I mean, that doesn’t impinge on you ethically, doesn’t confront you intellectually. It’s just…Van Til says, Therefore the argument is not over whether a God exists the argument is over whether THE GOD JEHOVAH exists.
10:22 GLB PREFACES VT QUOTE.
Now, in light of this remark about transcendental reasoning being concrete, I think you can appreciate, and I do want to read this quotation from Introduction to Systematic Theology, pages 190 and 191. Van Til maintains that our apologetical argument or our method in general starts with the actuality of the Bible. Listen to this quote and then kind of ruminate on it. Let this kind of sink in.
10:53 VT QUOTE:
“Reformed faith has set the idea that we must begin with the actuality of the book over against the rationalism and irrationalism of unbelieving thought. The Reformed faith has set the idea that we must begin with the actuality of the book. We must not pretend that we have established the possibility of the book and the necessity of it in terms of a philosophy that we did not get from the book. We have as Christians indeed learned with Calvin to interpret ourselves in terms of the book and that on the authority of the book and then we look to the book for the interpretation of the meaning of the facts.”
11:38 GLB COMMENTS.
That’s another one of those buried nuggets that if I were doing this, you know how modern books often have quotations, you know, put in a box in the middle of the page? That’s one of the ones that I’d really put on a boilerplate. Not everyone gets the point immediately, and that’s why I want you to think about this. Van Til says is, I’m not going to come to the Bible with a philosophy that’s outside the Bible that has allowed me to say this is possible or even necessary. Devastating! I’m not going to begin… How can I put this? Well, I’ll use a modern illustration. I’m not going to begin with Quine’s philosophy and come to the unbeliever and say, know, if we’re good Quineans, I can show you the necessity of the Bible. So you have no objection now when I come to the Bible.
12:27 Cont. …NOT WORKING UP TO THE BIBLE BUT STARTING WITH THE BIBLE!
Van Til says, I don’t work up to the possibility or even the necessity of the Bible from outside the Bible, a philosophy that now makes it credible or respectable to turn to the Bible. He says, I begin with the actuality of the Bible. Or if you will, this apologetic is immediately in your face. Like, Jehovah has spoken! I’m not going to talk about the general idea of revelation or the notion that wouldn’t such a God reveal Himself? Isn’t it very probable? I’m going to say, here’s a book. It claims to be from God, a very specific kind of God, and it says, you are in rebellion against Him. You need to repent. We begin right there with the actuality, the concrete full details of the Christian worldview. See, that’s not what transcendental arguments look like when you follow Kant or Strawson or anybody else. So hope you get a notion here or you can pick up on this notion of uniqueness of the presuppositional approach.
13:29 Cont. …START WITH THE BIBLE THEN REASON TRANSCENDENTALLY … WITHOUT THIS WORLDVIEW YOU CAN’T MAKE SENSE OF ANYTHING … THIS IS THE PRECONDITION OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE.
But with that in mind, that we’re dealing with an entire worldview, not just abstractions and so forth, a very concrete kind of God, the actuality of the Bible, then we reason transcendentally. And we say, without this worldview, you can’t make sense out of anything. This is the precondition for the intelligibility of human experience.
13:53 CLASS COMMENT (Indiscernible Audio) … FOLLOWING THE QUOTES IN VT’S BOOK.
13:59 GLB RESPONDS
14:07 CLASS COMMENTS (Indiscernible Audio) THE ORIGINS OF VT’S ARGUMENT?
14:20 GLB RESPONDS – VT WOULD SAY HE STOOD ON THE SHOULDERS OF THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE HIM … CALVIN, KUYPER…
I’m going to give you two answers, David, to the question, you know, where did Van Til get this? Did he come up with it himself and so forth? Van Til was a very godly man, a very humble man. If you ask Van Til that question, his response was, and you find this written in his literature, but he used it, you know, publicly when he was done. He said, I merely am standing on the shoulders of giants. Van Til said, Calvin and Kuyper and all these great reformed theologians have taught me. And if I’m able to see a little bit further than them, Van Til felt that he was being more consistent with what Kuyper believed from Calvin and so forth, that if he was able to do that, it’s only because he was standing on their shoulders. And would be that God gives us all such humility and recognize we’ve learned from others. That’s what Van Til would tell you. And that’s true enough as far as it goes. But now somebody who doesn’t have to be…
15:14 Cont. GLB Gets more candid in describing VT and his Contribution.
…Humble, I mean being the person you’re talking about, an outsider talking about Van Til. I wish Van Til had been a better writer and so forth so that much of this stuff had been organized in a way so we could come to it and be more readily accessible. But apart from that defect, I believe he’s one of most brilliant men who ever lived. Not because I knew him, not because he was a beloved teacher, but you read this stuff and you say, this is just incredible. I think he’s drawn together, you know, streams from all sorts of things. He knew his philosophy inside and out. You’re going to think this is the peon for Van Til today. I don’t mean it that way. I would talk to Van Til in his office at Westminster Seminary, and I mean, he had books everywhere. I mean, he would go from ancient philosophy, you know, to Kant, to Barth, and Bruner, and so forth. Just all, I mean, it’s just massive, the stuff he had. He told me that when he was in graduate school at Princeton, that they had to read Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel in the original. Well, you know, I’m not sure I want to read Hegel even in translation. But I mean, he mastered the heavyweights and he mastered them in their original language and so forth. I think he was just a brilliant man. He knew his philosophy and he stood on the shoulders of Calvin and Kuyper and others and that just gave him a really advantageous position to see what we have to do in terms of argument.
16:38 Cont. GLB Describes VT.
And I would add to it the godliness of his life. That’s why I say Van Til was never willing to let apologetics or philosophy become passionless. It’s always a claim on your heart. It’s always a matter of will you be faithful to God. So sometimes you’d listen to Van Til teaching in the classroom, you weren’t sure if he was teaching or preaching. Or if you listen to Van Til, we go across the street to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church right across from Westminster Seminary and Van Til would be preaching in the pulpit. I still remember my first year there, listening to Van Til preach he was preaching…Usually he preached on the whole Bible You couldn’t get Van Til to you know stick to a particular text you you know be over all sorts of…that’s because of the breadth of his knowledge and what he was trying to say. But I what I want to tell you about is I remember sitting there and listening to Van Til preach about Noah’s neighbors. And Noah is preaching, you know the gospel he’s telling them they got to repent They’ve got to get right with God the judgment of God is coming. And then Van Til portrays Noah’s neighbors and saying, what’s wrong with you, Noah? Don’t you realize that there’s no relationship between the I-thou and the I-it relationship? Listen, he’s preaching on Sunday morning to a congregation. He just pulls in, basically, it’s dimensionalism. It’s Kant all over again. How do you get the causal world in connection with the personal world or the world of freedom? So his philosophy was preached and his philosophy in the classroom was preached as well. I mean, it was just because of that godliness, I think he also saw that we could never do apologetics or philosophy in a way that allowed it to be made abstract without that claim being put on us.
18:22 Cont. VT Has Done A Unique Service.
So in answering your question, I think Van Til has done a unique service in the Christian church. And if I can stand on his shoulders a little bit, I’d like just to clean up a bit of the way he put it and make it more accessible to the public. In most of my teaching, I feel that’s what I’m doing. But Van Til…you don’t find it as good, I don’t think, anywhere else. But of course, it’s there in Tertullian, there in Calvin, it’s there in other philosophers. I have a paper written by one of my students on the transcendental argument…features of transcendental argument in the apologetic of C.S. Lewis that I had out on my desk. I was thinking of sharing part of that with you, but we don’t have time. Van Til is not the only one who thought this way, but I think he’s the only one who systematically pulled it together.
In the case of C.S. Lewis, I mean, some of you who know him, some of his best stuff is transcendental. You know, the self-contradiction of the naturalist, you know. If all we have is nature, then we don’t ever have any reason to believe what nature forces us to believe, C.S. Lewis said. He takes the unbeliever’s worldview and basically just tweaks it, turns it inside out, destroys it on its own terms. That’s transcendental reasoning. So I don’t want to say only Van Til saw this, but I do think Van Til had a context and a passion and a system in terms of which he presented it. Well, I’ve probably said enough. I have to finish this lecture at some point.
19:53 #3 UNIQUE USE OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT … RESTS ON AUTHORITY (A REFERENCE TO THE PREVIOUS LECTURE).
The uniqueness of the presuppositional use of transcendental argument is that it deals with entire worldviews and it’s concrete, not abstract. And finally, the position that we are arguing rests on authority. It rests on authority. And two brief, well just one quotation, and then a reminder that I said, for Van Til, this apologetic calls for conversion. Ultimately, the unbeliever who’s being refuted by our arguments needs to see he has to throw away the authority by which he’s been living and now live a new kind of life. He needs to come under a different authority.
20:36 GLB gives another authority example … WE DON’T BUILD OUR WORLDVIEW BLOCK BY BLOCK.
Another way in which you see this rest on authority though is that we have to ask, well, how do we get the Christian worldview? Do we get the Christian worldview by building up block by block, element by element, logic, self-consciousness, uniformity in nature, moral absolutes, the personality of God? Is that how we do it? And finally we get the Christian worldview and then we go out and we say, okay, we’ve got this worldview. We challenge you. What’s your world say by contrast?
21:10 Cont. GLB STRESSES POINT.
Is that our method? Do we build up the Christian worldview block by block? No, we don’t. Not at all. I’m stressing this point. Trust me, I’m a trained professional. I know what I’m doing here. Don’t try to do it at home, but I can do it here. I have run into the objection so many times, and that’s why I want to make sure you’ve got this clear tonight. So when you hear the objection, you say oh, well, that’s difficult to here.
21:37 Cont …PEOPLE WHO TRY TO MAKE ANOTHER RELIGION THE TRANSCENDENTAL FOR EVERYTHING, OR, MAKE THE TRANSCENDENTAL TO BE SIMILAR TO THE GOD OF CHRISTIANITY.
People will say to me, well Dr. Bahnsen, why does it have to be the Christian worldview? Why couldn’t somebody come along and just say, well my worldview is a God that’s the foundation for logic and the uniformity of nature and moral absolutes. That is just take as much of what you’ve been talking about as is convenient for my intellectual purposes and then just get rid of all the other stuff. You know, the Old Testament stories and miracles and redemption and eschatology and all that. Wouldn’t that kind of defeat you? And I know many people that get really hung up on that and they say, yeah, why can’t we just have deism be the transcendental for the meaningfulness of everything? And the answer is, where’d you get your worldview? Did you get your worldview building it up block by block by block, element by element? If so, then the person who proposes Deism or this reduced version of Christianity must show every element to be necessary and coherent with every other element on its own. He cannot begin with the system and then say, okay, now I want to this part out, throw this part out, and throw this part out. Why? Because if you begin with the Christian system, If you begin concretely with the Christian system, you’re not allowed to throw any elements out.
23:01 Cont. GLB gives a reductio ad absurdum to this challenge (e.g. MUMBO JUMBO).
So anybody who gives me, I’m going to make up a name for this system that looks like Christianity, that’s the evil twin of Christianity to a certain extent, okay? Let’s just call that Mumbo Jumbo. That’s my worldview, Mumbo Jumbo. Mumbo Jumbo’s got a god. Mumbo Jumbo’s got a god that controls every factor of the universe. Mumbo Jumbo is a god that creates every factor of the universe, on and on and on. And so the person says, you’ve got Christianity, I have Mumbo Jumbo, and I say fine. Where’d you get mumbo jumbo? What defines that worldview? What determines that worldview? Now, one possibility to answer that question is, oh well I took the Bible and I edited it. I got rid of all the stuff we didn’t need and that’s Mumbo Jumbo. I’d say, oh well then you didn’t actually start with the Bible because if you started with the Bible, the Bible says every jot and tittle got to be there.
23:57 Cont. Let’s ask you again…you did not Start with CHRISTIANITY.
Now, let’s go back and ask you again. You did not begin with an affirmation of the biblical system and then start… The guy says, okay, well, I didn’t accept the Bible and its authority. I just got my ideas from the Bible. I say, okay, then each and every one of them got to be built up individually. You know, right back to the old rock in a bottomless ocean. The unbeliever can’t do that. He can’t take individual elements. First you get logic, then you get nature, then you get a human mind. He can’t bring all these things together. He’s in the same boat as the guy who’s trying to do it from scratch. Or the person’s to say, well, I got this from another god. And say, oh, OK, now we have something to talk about. Where did this god reveal himself, if it is a he, or a person? And now we’re doing apologetics with world religions, right?
24:46 Cont. The Bhagavadgita.
One of the biggest mistakes the Christian in the pew makes, I think, when it comes to apologetics with respect to world religions, is they think world religions have something that matches what we have. And so, how can we claim the Bible? They’ve got their holy book too. You’ve got to ask about what kind of holy book you’re talking about. The Bhagavad Gita is not in the same ballpark with the Bible. Why not? Well, because the Bible says we have a personal God who thinks rationally and clearly, speaks verbally, and has recorded that in this book. Is that the Bhagavad Gita? The Bhagavad Gita does not have a God that’s separate from the individual who’s reading about God. That individual is god. Because if you understand the Bhagavad Gita, all is one. This god, whatever you want to call it, is not personal because it can have no definite characteristics. Personality or impersonality are equally illusion because all is one. This god doesn’t speak verbally and therefore doesn’t record his personal revelation in a book. Bhagavad Gita is a religious book, but it’s not anywhere like what the Bible is. And on and on and on, we go through the various options.
25:56 Cont. THE POINT IS, WHERE DID MUMBO JUMBO COME FROM? …CANNOT FORULATE A WORLDVIEW THAT MAKE EXPERIENCE INTELLIGIBLE ON A PIECE-BY-PIECE BASIS.
Where did mumbo jumbo come from then? It turns out that anybody who wants to take Christianity and just, you know, edit it down has an authority outside of the Bible by which he’s living, right? And by that authority he edits the Bible. But if that’s true, then by that authority he must establish every point that he puts into his system called mumbo jumbo. And that’s the same as the argument with any garden variety unbeliever. You can’t formulate a worldview that makes experience intelligible on a piece-by-piece basis. And so Van Til says our transcendental argument is about entire worldviews, it’s reasoning that is concrete, not formal and abstract, and we openly admit that our position rests on authority.
26:51 Cont. MUMBO JUMBO ADHERENT FLIPS THE QUESTION AROUND TO THE CHRISTIAN.
See I’ve asked the adherent of mumbo jumbo, where did your position come from? And he’s had real problems with it. And he says, I can ask that question to you. Where did your position come from? And I say, God revealed it. Well, why do you accept it? On his authority. Wait a minute, you can’t just accept this on authority. I say, well, if the ultimate authority is speaking here, I can. Because if it’s the ultimate authority who’s speaking, there is no authority outside of that by which I could establish this authority. Now, I’m not telling you that you just need to ask no questions, just fall down and accept this authority. But I’m saying when you read this book, you’ll find out that the book has got to be accepted on its own say so. Because of the nature of what it claims.
27:40 Cont. IF THE BIBLE IS TRUE, IT IS THE HIGHEST AUTHORITY.
If the Bible is true, the Bible has to be the highest authority. The guy says, I’m not prepared to say the Bible’s true. And I say, that’s why we’re arguing. What’s your alternative? There’s the transcendental argument, right? The alternative is this long discussion we have about how could you have science, how could you have logic, how could you have moral absolutes if you don’t accept the ultimate authority of the Bible. But the point is, those of us who accept the Bible don’t accept it because of some authority outside the Bible. Because if we did, the Bible wouldn’t be what it claims to be. The highest authority of all, God speaking to us.
28:14 CLASS COMMENT (Indiscernible Audio) …Quran.
28:24 WHEN WE COMPARE WORLDVIEWS WE HAVE TO COMPARE THE CONTENT OF THE WORLDVIEWS NOT JUST THE AUTHORIY CLAIMS …GLB DEMONSTRATES WITH THE Quran.
When we compare worldviews, we have to compare the content of the worldviews, not just authority claims. But it is true that if Allah is the true God, his words got to stand on its own say so. That’s formally correct. And so when we deal with the Muslim, we don’t just say, I’ve got an authority, you have an authority, we can’t talk. We say, we better read what these worldviews are all about. So compare a worldview that says that if you fall asleep praying, satan will urinate in your ear, you know, to a worldview that says, JESUS died on the cross for our sin. Compare a worldview that says, you know, that you have these angels, you know, virtually on each shoulder that are influencing you. And on the final day, your good deeds are going to be weighed against your bad deeds and ask, how is it that Allah can forgive any bad deed? How do you outweigh them against a worldview that says, God can’t deal with bad deeds, He’s too just and so He’s got to pay the price for them. So you start comparing internally what the worldview is.
29:24 CLASS COMMENT (Partly Indiscernible Audio) …HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE A WORLDVIEW THAT’S ALMOST A MIRROR IMAGE OF CHRISTIANITY?
30:08 GLB RESPONDS and explains why there cannot be multiple transcendental worldviews that make experience intelligible.
Yeah, the reason why you don’t ultimately…after lunch that was going to be the first thing we talked about, is why can’t you have multiple transcendental worldviews that will do the job? In the end, the only way you could have two, they’d have to be a mirror image of each other, not just to a large extent. But if they’re a mirror image, you know what we’re doing? We’re just changing names. Now you have the same worldview, it’s just assigned…instead of calling Him JESUS, you have some other name that you give to Him. It’s either exactly the same or it differs. Now if it differs, all the details of the Christian worldview have to be taken into account. We’ve already said that. And that includes JESUS being born in Bethlehem, dying on a cross, being raised from the dead, so forth and so on. That all must be there.
30:57 Cont. Evidential Method (NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH EVIDENTIALISM) …VT WOULD SAY THAT THE EVIDENTIAL METHOD FITS INTO THE TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD … (FACTS DON’T SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES).
You say, well, that doesn’t look very transcendental. That looks evidential. Van Til never had problems with going to the evidence and so forth. He said, but you can’t make sense out of any evidence if you don’t have the framework Christian theology. But I’m going to add to that, Van Til also would say that too is transcendental because we wouldn’t be able to know about Jesus dying on the cross being raised from the dead unless this universe is what Christianity says it is. Jesus’ redemptive work is necessary to make sense out of what we’re doing intellectually because you have to ask yourself, I mean we’re getting very abstract, we have to ask yourself why is it there’s any need to have an epistemology at all? Why can’t we just take for granted that everything people believe is true? Well that means you have to have some view of human nature which calls for a certain view of history, man being a sinner, so forth. Van Til says, you can have other alternatives. But whenever other alternatives are posed, we can show that they are incoherent and meaningless. Does that scratch where you’re itching?
31:59 CLASS COMMENT (Indiscernible Audio).
33:03 GLB EXPLAINS HOW THE CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW (AS THE TRANSCENDENTAL) CAN GROW WITHIN A LIMITED RANGE.
The transcendental is the Christian worldview, and the Christian worldview can grow within a limited range. And I say that because Abraham’s understanding of redemption is obviously not as much as David’s. And David’s understanding of redemption is not as much as Matthew’s before the cross. And Matthew’s understanding of redemption before the cross is not as great as Paul’s writing after the cross. So there again, we see that there’s a development of detail, but it’s the same worldview that we’re talking about. We still need this doctrine of redemption that is there, and we believe that God, for His own reasons, decided to work in history and to progressively reveal it.
33:51 Cont. We can do apologetics more effectively than those before us. Those after us will do it better than we can today.
Now, the cash value of this remark is that we can do apologetics more effectively now than could Amos in the Old Testament. Now, that isn’t to say we’re inspired like Amos. He had advantages we don’t. And in my view, during the period of Revelation, special Revelation, God’s messengers also performed miracles and things of that nature to add validation to what they’re doing. But the miracles by themselves don’t validate it. You still have to have the word of the prophet, previously given in terms of which the miracle takes place. But my point would simply be, after God completes the presentation of the Christian worldview, we’re obviously in a better position to argue the richness of our worldview against the other ones than if you were at the very beginning. But I don’t think that goes on and on and on. God stops the process of revelation when the key work of redemption has been accomplished. It’s now being applied. We’re now taking the Word of God, we preach it to the hearts of man, that they might be redeemed…and we’re arguing apologetically from within that worldview. We can do, as I said, a better job than those who didn’t have the whole system. But we’re not going to do as good a job as when God opens up the canon again and JESUS returns and has an open revelation of Himself to all men. Obviously, that’s going to be a lot stronger apologetical presentation than anything that I’m doing. Okay?
35:18 Cont. There’s Continuity.
But what I want you to see is there’s continuity even though there are degrees of detail and persuasive power in there. It’s the same worldview. Abraham had the same worldview as Paul. Did Abraham say everything that Paul did? No. But he did see Jesus’ day and he rejoiced. I mean, so there’s something there. And do I see the Christian worldview right now, even with the completed canon, as good as I’m going to when I’m in heaven glorified? No. And so there’s unity and diversity in this. It’s the same worldview, and yet I do allow for diverse details, or if you will, greater depth of conceptual adequacy in that worldview.
36:01 CLASS COMMENT (Indiscernible Audio).
36:04 GLB RESPONDS … (the need to resume lecture).
Well, he uses the transcendental argument, I think, at the Areopagus. Excuse me? Yes, and with Agrippa, we see it, though Paul…I’m talking about actual speeches of Paul, we can see it. But you see it directly when Paul says in 1 Corinthians that the wisdom of this world is made foolish by God. What he’s saying is, take all the philosophers of this world, God reduces them to absurdity…To foolishness, to use Paul’s term.
Okay, okay, okay, okay, I’ve been very generous in letting you interrupted me. I still haven’t read the quote. And so I’ll read the quote and then I’ll take your question first. I’m sorry.
36:47 GLB states what makes VT’S use of the transcendental argument different includes that he begins with AUTHORITY.
My point is that what makes Van Til’s use of the Transcendental Program different includes that he says, I begin with my worldview on authority. I openly admit that. It’s a self-authorizing thing and I’m calling for people to be converted. They have to change authorities in their lives.
37:06 VT QUOTE … COMMON GRACE PAGE 8.
Common Grace, page 8. Where am I? We accept this God upon Scriptural authority. In the Bible alone do we hear of such a God, okay? Muslims may talk about it Allah, but we say it’s only in the Bible you hear about this kind of GOD. Begin with the TRINITY. There’s an obvious difference, right? Such a God, to be known at all, cannot be known otherwise than by virtue of His own voluntary revelation. If God is absolute, If He is the creator, if He is transcendent, if He’s distinct from creation, if He is sovereign, if He is self-contained, if He is in need of nothing, this kind of God, Van Til says, such a God could only be known by His own voluntary revelation. He must therefore be known for what He is and known to the extent that He is known by authority alone.
38:03 Cont. PAGE 8.
Page 8, We do not first set out without God to find our highest philosophical concept in terms of which we think we can interpret reality and then call this highest concept divine. I alluded to that already. We don’t start abstractly talking about generic philosophical problems, find the unifying concept and say, oh, that must be God. Van Til says we begin with a God who is personal, concrete and He reveals himself in terms of His own authority. And now I’m going skip a few lines, and this too is a boilerplate quotation in my estimation.
38:45 Cont. QUOTE.
Have we no philosophical justification for the Christian position? Or are we to find a measure of satisfaction in the fact that others too, non-Christian scientists and philosophers as well as ourselves, have in the end to allow for some mystery in our system? Van Til says, well, are we just to be satisfied that everybody has got mystery in their system? We don’t have philosophical justification. And so we just accept our position on authority? Amazing thing is he wrote these words in 1947, I believe. That’s what I check. John Warwick Montgomery, years later, portrays Van Til as saying that very thing. We’re all in this context of mystery, and I’ve got my authority, you’ve got yours. Van Til anticipated it, again, in his first major apologetical discussion. Let me finish.
39:38 Cont. QUOTE … THE UNBELIEVER ACCUSES THE BELIEVER OF DOING THEOLOGY AND NOT PHILOSOPHY.
Have we no philosophical justification for the Christian position? To all this we must humbly but confidently reply by saying that we have the best of philosophical justification for our position. It is not as though we are in a bad way and that we seek for some comfort from others who are also in a bad way. We as Christians alone have a position that is philosophically defensible. The frank acceptance of our position on authority which at first blush, because of our inveterate tendency to think along non-Christian lines, seems to involve the immediate and total rejection of all philosophy, this frank acceptance of authority is, philosophically, our very salvation.
Some of you who have been in class where professors want to dismiss your point of view as being religious or theology, not doing philosophy. That’s exactly what Van Til’s talking about here. Let me say it again. Van Til says, frank acceptance of our position on authority, which at first blush because of our inveterate tendency to think along non-Christian lines, seems to involve the immediate and total rejection of all philosophy.
40:58 GLB COMMENTS.
We’re doing transcendental, presuppositional, apologetical argument. Somebody says, well, where do you get your worldview? And I say, well, I accept it on authority. The authority of God speaking in this book. It’s because God is the ultimate authority, that that book doesn’t have any higher authority. So I accept it on authority. I’ll tell you straight out. I’m not embarrassed by that. Van Til says we do blush, why? Because of our inveterate tendency to think like unbelievers. What an indictment. I mean, he’s not being mean, but isn’t that true? Why does that bother us to say that to unbelievers? I set this on the authority of God. Well, because they’re going to make fun of us. We want to think like unbelievers think. Well, they don’t think on the authority of God. So now there’s real tension, right? Van Til says, at first blush, this seems to be, how does he put it, the immediate and total rejection of all philosophy.
41:51 GLB EXPANDS.
So I’m dealing with a philosophy professor in class or just an intelligent unbeliever out on the street. And he says, well, what’s your philosophy of life? I mean, OK, you’ve reduced me to absurdity. I can’t answer your questions. Well, what do you offer by comparison? And I say, well, I have this worldview, this very concrete worldview, this particular kind of God. And he well, why do you accept that? And I said, well, I accept it on authority. I begin with it on God’s authority. He goes, oh, well, then you’re not doing philosophy. You’d be immediately rejected. Philosophy can’t be done on authority. And how’s Van Til reply? This frank acceptance of authority is, and he puts it, he sets it off grammatically with the word philosophically, which is a real hammer blow. He says this frank acceptance of authority is philosophically our very salvation.
So my reply to the person who says, well, you’re not doing philosophy anymore. My reply is, let me tell you, buddy, this is the very salvation of philosophy. If you don’t start with authority, this authority, this God, this worldview, you’re going to destroy all philosophy. So when you tell me philosophers can’t do this, I tell you then philosophers must die. I mean, not we’re going to stab you to death, but you’re going to destroy your philosophy, right? Philosophy cannot survive under your stricture that you cannot begin with authority. You must begin with authority. And I’ve already shown, if you begin with your authority, what do you end up with? ABSURDITY!
43:32 GLB COMMENTS ON HOW A BETTER ORGANIZING OF VT’S QUOTES WOULD HAVE HELPED MANY OF US … CLASS COMMENTS.
43:53 GLB REPHRASES HIS PREVIOUS EXAMPLE OF RESTING ON AUTHORITY.
We can put this a lot of different ways, but let me rephrase that. I begin with authority, you begin with authority. You begin with your own authority, that’s subjective, therefore reduces the skepticism. The authority I begin with is God’s authority, therefore I don’t fall prey to the subjectivism of your worldview. We all begin with authority, yours destroys reason, mine gives a foundation for reason. So, if you want to keep reasoning, you’d better right now, confess your sins and give thanks to God because only because of God can you reason at all. That’s heavy duty stuff. (More Details In The Previous Lecture)
44:27 CLASS COMMENTS (Indiscernible Audio) (…INTERNAL CRITIQUE OF CHRISTIANITY?).
44:35 GLB RESPONDS.
Okay, now we’re back to canon translation and interpretation. Van Til says, what’s the foundation on which you’re standing when you tell me that? When you start questioning it, you’re standing on my foundation and together we can try to make my interpretation of the Bible better, but the substance of the Christian worldview is the only one that makes sense out of anything, even when we’re talking about biblical interpretation. And that gives, by the way, for those of you who study hermeneutics with me, that gives a really I think brilliant insight and depth to this remark the reformers made, that the Bible interprets itself. You’ve got to have the biblical system before you can even go and let the Bible speak clearly to you.
45:23 GLB EXPANDS USING THE THEORY OF LOGIC.
Most first-year student logic are not given this information. They may discover it by watching or reading journals and so forth. Logicians argue with each other about logic. They don’t always agree. In the history of philosophy, the best example is the law of excluded middle*. There have been schools of thought that reject the law of excluded middle and schools that affirm it. But there are other more arcane examples that could be given. Now, Randy says, here are logicians arguing about logic.
Now, do they reject the authority of logic while they’re arguing, while they’re refining? Of course not. They assume logic even while they’re trying to get a better, what, self-conception of what logic is all about. Even while they’re reflectively trying to develop a science of logic, they’re using logic when they do that. So when someone says, what about interpretation and all that? We say, well, yeah, we’re trying to work out better, more adequate interpretations. But all the while we’re assuming the truth of the Bible as we’re trying to interpret it better.
*The law of the excluded middle, also known as the principle of excluded middle, is a foundational principle in logic and philosophy. It states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true, and there are no other possibilities. In simpler terms, it means every statement is either true or false, and there’s no middle ground. (Source: Ai Overview, Wikipedia, Study.com)
46:22 CLASS COMMENTS (Indiscernable Audio) (…questions surrounding the interpretation of THE BIBLE).
46:46 GLB RESPONDS.
What you’re saying, I think, is a valuable point because it shows that all along God is the conditioning context in that I didn’t choose Him. He made it possible for me to choose Him. That’s true. But what I was saying is we don’t just choose this authority in abstract. We are looking at a worldview that has detail to it. This worldview claims ultimate authority. So yes, I accept it on its authority. But what happens if you don’t? Then you have what? The impossibility of the contrary. You reduce the alternative to absurdity. And so somebody says, but your world that you said you started with, there’s questions of interpretation. I say, yeah, there are. But we’re still assuming the truth of the Bible while we try to get a better grasp of the Bible.
47:34 VT QUOTE – WHAT’S THE KEY ISSUE … THE UNBELIEVER CAN’T GIVE AN ACCOUNT FOR THEIR COUNTING.
What’s the key issue? Van Til says…I really wish I could quote here, but we’re going to not have our lunch if I do. The key issue is…yeah, that’s right, the better students would say, Dr. Bahnsen, we’d rather have Van Til than a hot dog. The issue, he says, is not what the unbeliever can do intellectually. Van Til is not talking about the intellectual accomplishments of unbelievers. He would be the first to say unbelievers are brilliant in many areas. They’ve done grand things. The issue is not what the unbeliever can do intellectually, but whether he can give an account of it.
A little aphorism that he would use in class for students to pick up on this was really helpful. He said, I’m not saying unbelievers don’t count. One, two, three, four, five. I’m not saying they don’t do math. I’m not saying they don’t count. I’m saying they can’t give an account of their counting. They can’t give a worldview in terms of which counting makes sense. So I’m not saying unbelievers can’t go to the moon, can’t cure cancer, can’t do all these great things, build bridges, whatever it may be, write symphonies. I’m saying that they can’t give an account of how that’s possible. They can’t give intelligibility to their own efforts.
48:52 VT QUOTE – THE KEY ISSUE … WE MUST FIND WITHIN A WORLDVIEW AN ANSWER TO THE BASIC EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS. THE TRIUNE GOD IS THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE.
What we must do, Van Til says, is find within a worldview an answer to the basic epistemological questions. How do we know? How is meaning possible? How is science possible? We must find an answer to the basic epistemological questions within a worldview. And as he puts it in Common Grace, page 64, if I can find it quickly, Van Til says, the ontological trinity will be our interpretive concept everywhere. God is our concrete universal. That’s jargon for God is the one who has universal knowledge, but also all the details as a concrete person. God doesn’t gain universality in His understanding by becoming abstract. He’s the concrete universal. And now listen to this. In Him, thought and being are coterminous, in Him the problem of knowledge is solved. And so the key issue here is what worldview will enable you to settle the problems of epistemology? Van Til says it’s the worldview of the triune God. In terms of that, epistemological problems can be solved.
50:07 VT QUOTE … THE KEY QUESTION IS WHO FIRST GIVES ORDER TO THE PARTICULARS? (WHO FIRST RATIONALIZES THE FACTS? IS IT GOD OR man?)
And the key question for Van Til, it’s not the only way of putting it, but Van Til over and over and over again comes back to this orientation as he challenges unbelieving philosophers. The question is who first gives order to the particulars? Is it the mind of God that gives order to the particulars? Or, does the mind of man running side by side with the mind of God give order to the particulars first? Or, as Van Til elsewhere puts it, Who first rationalizes the facts? Who first makes the particular facts rational, gives them coherence or system? Is it God or man?
50:47 Cont. VT QUOTE.
Defense of the Faith, page 116. You find a similar remark in page 165, but I’m just going to settle with this one, I think. On a non-Christian basis, facts are, quote, rationalized for the first time when interpreted by man. You have all these brute facts, all this random world out there. And man brings order to the facts when he interprets them. He gathers them together, and then he gives a system of interpretation.
On a non-Christian basis, facts are rationalized for the first time when interpreted by man. But for one who holds that the facts are already part of an ultimately rational system by virtue of the plan of God, it is clear that such hypotheses as presuppose the non-existence of such a plan must, even from the outset of his investigation, be considered irrelevant.
51:39 Cont. WHO FIRST RATIONALIZES THE FACTS? IS IT GOD OR man? IF YOU CHOOSE man the facts reduce to subjectivism and skepticism! YOU MUST BEGIN WITH THE MIND OF GOD!
Who first rationalizes the facts? Does God? Is it His Mind that which gives intelligibility, coherence, meaning and order to the facts? Or, does man first do it? Over and over over again, Van Til says you have to choose between one of those worldviews. And if you choose that man does it first, what is it reduced to? Class, subjectivism and then skepticism. That’s exactly right. Start with man, you’re going to end with man. And, you won’t be able to have objective knowledge. You must begin with the Christian worldview where the order that’s given to the facts is there because of The Mind of God. He is the one who plans and creates all things.
52:23 Cont. VT QUOTE (POWERFUL!).
In another place, Reformed Pastor in Modern Thought, page 89, Van Til says, The consistently Christian conception of the a priori, that which we know apart from observation, is that which presupposes the creator-creature distinction and makes the covenant inclusive of all the activities of man. We begin with the Christian worldview, everything, the creator-creature distinction, the covenant, all the activities of man. Thus, there is involved in every active interpretation a two-fold activity, an activity of God and an activity of man. The two are not opposed to one another, nor do they work at different times or in different dimensions. No facts can be interpreted without reference to the activity of the human mind. But, if skepticism and subjectivism are to be avoided, there must be back of the activity of man the activity of God.
Van Til says, your mind is active, you’re trying to interpret things, but if you don’t have a worldview that says back of all my interpretive efforts is God’s original interpretation, then you’ll be reduced to subjectivism and skepticism. The facts will never be brought together. There’ll be no coherence, no order, no intelligibility.
Now with this introductory lecture or discussion, after we come back from lunch, I’m going to read just nine or ten pages of Van Til and I hope you’re going to say it was all there this is the filet mignon. [Audio Abruptly Ends]
- Four Types of Proof (1 of 10)
- Van Til’s Why I Believe in God (2 of 10)
- Kant in Context (3 of 10)
- Contemporary Transcendental Arguments, Part 1 (4 of 10)
- Contemporary Transcendental Arguments, Part 2 (5 of 10)
- Summary of Transcendental Arguments, Part 1 (6 of 10)
- Summary of Transcendental Arguments, Part 2 (7 of 10)
- Apologetical Transcendental Argument (8 of 10)
- Back to Basics (9 of 10)
- Van Til’s Critics: Hoover, Dooyeweerd, Frame (10 of 10)
