[Also on Substack]
My friend, analytical philosopher extraordinaire William Vallicella, Ph.D., answered the question, “Why am I bothering to read [Christian apologist Cornelius] Van Til?”
I urge my reader to read Bill’s answer. Since I can’t comment on his Substack, I’ll venture an answer on mine: he’s wrestling with Van Til because Bill’s dialectically sensitive mind, ever open to what might be said against his position, cannot help but entertain the possibility that the sovereign God of Van Til’s theology is the true God. It’s how the God-breathed (theopneustos) Scriptures describe him. But like an open mouth, the open mind, as Chesterton put it so memorably, is ordered toward closing on something.
Bill’s humanistic speculations about “the autonomy of reason” are neither here nor there. His predilection for mediation between extremes notwithstanding, “autonomy” is a fiction. It is arguably a stance that makes God, by His own metaphor, nauseous (Revelation 3:16).
If Van Til is right, then God has ordained whatever comes to pass (Ephesians 1:11), including whether the Father has given Bill to the Son (John 37-40, 44), thus ensuring that Bill will be “generated from above” to “see” (mentally grasp or “get”) the Kingdom (John 3:3). Jesus will lose none of what the Father has given Him (John 6:39, 18:9). Only time will tell.
Bill implicitly ridicules Van Til’s contention that (in Bill’s paraphrase) “his finite, fallible, and indeed totally depraved reason . . . somehow is not so totally depraved as to prevent him from discerning the truths that God reveals to us.” Somehow? That’s regeneration (Titus 3:5), an instantaneous, sovereign act of the Holy Spirit! The spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1) don’t decide who’s on the receiving end of that act. They’re its patients, not agents.
If “in eternity past” the Father did not give Bill to the Son, then eventually Bill, sitting on the fence between Jerusalem and Athens, however “sympathetic to Christianity” he may be, will walk away, perhaps disappointed that Jesus would not feed him what he wants to be fed (John 6:66). On what kind of soil (Luke 8:4-9) has God’s Word fallen, in Bill’s case? Again, time will tell.
As Bill quotes Van Til, “reason itself . . . learns of its proper function from Scripture.”[1] What’s Bill’s alternative to Scripture? I’ve argued in my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, which includes two chapters on aspects of Bill’s skepticism toward Christian worldview apologetics (“presuppositionalism”), that there is no viable alternative.
For more on being “generated from above” (not “born again”), see my “‘Born again’: Born of Tradition, not Scripture. Otis Q. Sellers’s translation of γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν (John 3:3). It’s the ancestor of a chapter of my forthcoming Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which is in the interior design phase.
Note
[1] Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (4th ed.), 130.