Listening this morning to an old (well, 2022) podcast[1] by the great Calvinist apologist James R. White, I was startled by his reference to Thom Notaro’s 1980 Van Til and the Use of Evidence. (White says he paid $3.75 for his copy back in the day, but a used copy on Amazon will set you back forty-five bucks.) Startled, I say, because over forty years ago, the Roman Catholic periodical New Oxford Review published, in its November 1981 issue, pages 29-30, my cluelessly negative review of Notaro’s book.
Consistent with my habit of airing my political and philosophical dirty laundry (which exercise works against one’s intellectual pride), I hereunder post that review’s text (and its prefatory note), which I took the liberty of posting in 2013 on my old site (whose anniversary I noted the other day).
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On a “cringe-ometer” scale from 1 to 10, with 10 inducing a coma from embarrassment, this rates a 9. I pontificated about Van Til’s thought, about which I knew little first-hand, instead of actually reviewing a book about the role of evidence in an apologetic often mischaracterized as anti-evidence (even “fideistic”). In less than 600 words, I managed to beg every apologetical question, rendering myself a poster boy for the epistemological un-self-consciousness that, Van Til argued, renders every anti-Christian theistic worldview impotent.
In slight mitigation of my offense, I recall that as a New Yorker, who was not long before writing this a student in a doctoral program in philosophy, could not interact regularly with Van Til’s protégé, California-based Gregory L. Bahnsen, a Ph. D. in philosophy (USC, 1978). Had I been able to, my confusions would have been exposed and rectified much sooner. As it happened, I had to wait for the day I could carry around dozens of mp3s of his recorded lecture series and read many articles that are now freely available online. Even the very best of Bahnsen, his Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings & Analysis, was not available until after his passing.
I am posting this only to memorialize the flawed inception of my investigation into Van Til’s thought. I also observe that I did not give up.
Anthony Flood
January 16, 2013 (Slightly amended January 21, 2019) Continue reading “Evidence I wasn’t always a “Van Tillian””
In any case, I find myself enjoying their reaction to the money-making notes that I see coming (having seen the videos hundreds of times). The females, black and white, American, European, and Asian, invariably melt, even shed tears. Sometimes their accents make their English unintelligible to me, but the emotion is undeniable. Some male viewers, rendered speechless, are content in that silence; others, metaphysically shocked. “I thought they were black,” some mutter, followed by “Soul got no color!” or the equivalent.
No one who met Jim Sadowsky could ever forget him. I first saw him at a conference at Claremont University in California in August 1979; his great friend Bill Baumgarth, a political science professor at Fordham, was also there. His distinctive style of conversation at once attracted my attention. He spoke in a very terse way, and he had no patience with nonsense, a category that covered much of what he heard. If you gave him an argument and asked him whether he understood what you meant, he usually answered, “No, I don’t.” He once said to a fellow Jesuit, “that’s false, and you know it’s false.”
“And the Word became (ἐγένετο, egeneto) flesh (σάρξ, sarx) and dwelt (ἐσκήνωσεν, eskēnōsēn) among us . . . .” John 1:14
I welcome it, and recently got 
with Metaphysics,” Section 1 of Chapter 3, “Neutrality & Autonomy Relinquished,” 
From a friend, John Lancaster