8 Final Conclusion
8.1 Summary
Our work has been bold in presenting to us an outline of a vision of Christian philosophy. We examined the skeptical challenge and one of our most important conclusions was that it could be mitigated by understanding it was predominantly a psychological position rather than being a logical necessity. Skepticism or a general epistemological timidity was not an option for the epistemologically self-conscious. Similarly, we critiqued the role of science as the dominant cultural narrative, concluding there should be no special privileging of science above other cultural narratives. We then considered a critique of the wider conception of reason and rationality, positing it was defensible if and only if, the context was Christian. We then made extensive use of Plantinga who enabled us to arrive convincingly at the reasonableness of Christian belief as an epistemic option but found we needed to engage with Van Tillian thought to arrive at a proof of the necessity of Christian belief to be able to defend any claim to a fully rational philosophy.
To that end, we found that we needed to move beyond traditional deductive or inductive arguments, and into transcendental modes of reasoning. We examined the notion in general and the specific Van Tillian version of it identifying a set of objections and noting all but one could be robustly answered in a straightforward and convincing manner. We examined the final objection and noted that the previous attempt of Butler to answer this objection relied on a theological move that whilst permissible was not wholly satisfactory. We examined another possible solution which relied on further analysis of the nature of transcendental argument and found a plausible solution to the final objection. With the necessity of Christian belief established, we then probed the relevance of our programme for Christian political philosophy which had proved radically ineffective in countering the recent tyranny of government. We concluded that Christian involvement was mandated by epistemological self-consciousness owing to our conception stated at the beginning of our work that philosophy should be transformative.
8.2 Specific Conclusions
8.2.1 Overcoming Skepticism
The basic philosophical problem that stands most aggressively opposed to us was that of skepticism, but we found that on analysis, skepticism itself was multifaceted. We examined the skeptical challenge, understanding that philosophy asked questions and sometimes those questions originated in doubt and skepticism, we considered Descartes as the archetypal example of this mode of skepticism. This, in itself, was unobjectionable, we might call it methodological skepticism but when accepted as a general epistemological principle, as found in Hume, it proved utterly destructive of human understanding and importantly for our project, undermined any possibility of a universal, moral knowledge. We concluded such metaphysical skepticism could be mitigated by understanding it was predominantly a chosen, voluntaristic psychological disposition as opposed to being a logical necessity.
That is, skepticism in the global sense is incoherent, if we really could know nothing, we could never express that we could know nothing. Thus, the tragic terminus of Hume as he sought to take empiricism seriously was precisely that, he could not even find an ego that was the recipient of experience; even his position that he was just a “bundle” of perceptions was illegitimate on his own terms, “bundle” already assumes a non-empirical unifying concept. Wanting to mitigate this catastrophic conclusion regarding human rationality, we saw that Kant, with his division of nature into the phenomenal and the noumenal, was the first to answer Hume with the conception of transcendentals: those things which are assumed to make the knowledge of objects possible at all. For Kant this was a psychological apparatus, and his categories were those we must necessarily take to the world, with the traditional interpretation of Kant being that he was metaphysically agnostic regarding the noumenal, we cannot know the world as it really is.
Thus, with Kant we found there was a skeptical pivot in Western philosophy. Some retreated into the intuition or mysticism as encountering reality as it is “in itself,” accepting the legitimacy and indeed preferring the noumenal; knowledge gaining is at least in part and when pushed to the extreme, fundamentally irrational. Others denied the noumena and asserted phenomena is all we have, who we traced as the naturalistic movements of the 20th century sometimes elaborate and intricate in their details but fundamentally without a foundation for their reasoning. What we witnessed with the liberalism of a Schleiermacher was a demythologizing of a religious worldview to arrive at an ethic which suggested Christian virtues, which might also be, for a Schopenhauer, considered the virtues of other “holy men and women” of any religion, or of all. Yet, it was denied an authoritative, epistemological basis. Thus, the next step was to abandon such “bourgeois sentimentality” and to embrace the opposing “scientific” materialist view impregnated with a Hegelian assumption of the relentless march of history to its glorious confirmation of Ultimate Spirit.
We concluded we do not need to argue over the legitimacy of the materialist philosophies, the millions dead through Marxism and Fascism are a testimony to their failure. In contrast, we understand why Kant still wanted to posit concepts such as God as existing in the noumenal realm as necessary for practical reason, the phenomenal realm providing limiting boundaries for the faculty of scientific reasoning. This is a supremely important explication of philosophy that Kant gives us here and it confirms that at the root of our philosophy is an ethical assumption and that flows from our metaphysics and structures our epistemology. So, our practical ethical and political philosophy was argued to be by necessity theonomic, with the scriptures providing a resource of narrative that allowed us to generate a set of political principles consistent with the faith. Our conclusion was not that of a religious hegemony but an endorsement of the sphere sovereignty of neo-Calvinism found first in Kuyper which rejected theocratic or ecclesiastical government but maintained the moral imperative of the church to speak to each sphere regarding important ethical dimensions in research or technology. Thus, one of our most important conclusions was our argument for a taxonomy of philosophy that denies metaphysical skepticism and maintains a tripartite basis and a Christian metaphysical basis, that is articulated in our broader worldview as our imperative in the face of the failure of the non-Christian constructions.
8.2.2 Philosophy and Science
Philosophy we now understand as correlated with the whole of human knowledge, a synonym of science. We discovered from considering the work of Plantinga, that methodological naturalism could not be founded upon a commitment to philosophical naturalism but only on a supernaturalistic metaphysics. Philosophical naturalism, so characteristic of modern empirical science, was demonstrated as being self-vitiating. To deconstruct and challenge this pattern of reasoning as the model of all rationality, we gave substantial space to a discussion of the status and the nature of science in the wake of this discussion of Darwinism. Darwin himself had recognized what Plantinga called “Darwin’s doubt,” if all we have is nature, why should we believe in what nature says? If naturalism was true, there would be no way of expressing that it was in fact true; there would be no non-arbitrary starting point. Thus, we discovered that there is no solid edifice of “science” but that there are many different sciences and many incommensurate modes of what are said to be “science”. Carnap, Popper, Quine, and Kuhn bear testimony to radically different conceptions of “science.” Thus, one of our most useful conclusions is to debunk science as somehow the arbiter of all rationality or the foundation upon which a worldview is built, science is rather a function, a derivative of the worldview context in which it is established.
So, we considered for example, after the rise and fall of philosophical positivism, our age has been characterized by an equation of methodological naturalism with science, or a science that proceeds on the basis that there is no such being as God or the supernatural. This has proved to be a powerful, pragmatic mode of progressing the sciences, particularly those which we have later leveraged for technology and industrial progress; perhaps less so with the softer, social sciences but an emphasis on the tangible “cash value” of an idea is a powerful tool for judging its efficacy, and the fruits of modernity have brought the potential, if not the actuality, for the great improvement of the conditions of living on the planet. Life on Earth today is very different than little over a century ago.
We also examined the central role of evolutionary thought in modern science. We understood that there was a tautological dependency that was repeatedly appealed to that undergirded so many sciences; a trait ‘X’ present is deemed to be present because it offered evolutionary advantage, but that is simply to state what is there, is there. We have no explanation as to why it should have been of advantage. In the post-positivist naturalism of Quine and his disciples, this is expressed as an unargued behaviorism. We found that in the debate between the evolutionary schools of Dawkins and Gould, evolutionary thought was not an evidentially based science but a set of conflicting metaphysical dogmas upon which many divergent sciences were built. This is a powerful instrument in countering the tyranny of the sciences and its arguments against the Christian worldview.
We also examined the influence of physicalism in science, the belief that all non-physical processes, specifically those that are considered “mental” in character, are ultimately reducible to physical processes. This, again, was exposed as unargued dogma supported only by a clique of physicists and naturalists who were attempting to work out the implications of their naturalism. We also considered the importance of concepts of randomness and chance, especially as found in the new era of quantum physics. Much use had been made of the apparent lack of objectivity regarding the quantum world as justifying a lack of objectivity generally in the world, which was then seen to provide justification for a subjective and/or a skeptical philosophical position generally. However, we found that amongst some of the most senior mathematical physicists, there was an argument that quantum physics was failing to offer any coherent account of the physical world. Thus, far from establishing an imperative of rationality, it served to undermine any claim for science to be offering a rational account.
It was also seen to be a serious category mistake to attempt to use quantum physics as a general hermeneutical principle for reality as random and chaotic; it is rather that quantum effects are seen as explanatory in edge-case or anomalous data events. As Christians we can have confidence in the commitment of God to there being principles or laws of nature that are maintained by His commitment to them “as long as the Earth remains” (Gen 8:22) which also provides a guarantee for the inductive logic at the heart of many physical sciences. Philosophers of science have historically failed to satisfactorily give an account of induction, and the sciences have proceeded using the principle as an unargued dogma. The awareness of the weakness of inductive logic was one of the drivers for the many different iterations of scientific philosophy in the 20th century, none of which could provide a rigorous account.
So, in summary, without an answer to the “why should science be successful” question, science becomes value-agnostic, and history has taught us it then becomes a tool of the totalitarian. If we refuse to sidestep the philosophical question, we concluded from Plantinga that methodological naturalism could have warrant only when grounded in supernaturalistic metaphysics which we might also correlate with the principles of common grace and general revelation that we found were central to Van Tillian accounts. Science, when honestly executed, that is, executed with Christian metaphysical presuppositions, implicit or explicit, works because it really does tell us something about the way the world is. That is, we asserted a realistic conclusion, that it is plausible that the world really is the way a holistic science finds it to be because scripture gives us confidence in a logos that permeates all of creation.
Scripture communicates to us that we can expect laws, principles, and the inductive method to tell us something about the way the world is. Thus, we concurred with some of the major philosophers of the 20th century such as Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Quine, that holism, or a view of nature as a self-referential unity, is fundamental for us and that should be the definition of science. Whilst rejecting their metaphysics, we would concur that our empirical experience is always theory laden; there is no neutral place from which we sit outside of our worldview to judge the world. Thus, we can conclude it is perfectly legitimate for us to sit within our worldview and that is a place of substantial confidence for us as Christian philosophers.
8.2.3 Christianity, Religious Experience and Apologetic Philosophy
It is not pretended that this work presents the only vision of Christian philosophy that is possible and indeed, much of the outworking of this project has intersected sympathetically or critically with other, sometimes incommensurable, visions and versions of Christian philosophy. The desire was to do justice to the diversity of perspectives and deeply held convictions amongst different Christian communities in responding to the scriptural injunction to defend the faith; or simply, even the basic Christian spiritual instinct to testify to others regarding the positive message and effects of the Gospel. A distinctive of historical Christianity has been the outward looking nature of the faith, it evangelizes (clearly believing it has a message worth hearing) and seeks to be of service to both its nation and the wider interests of humanity in living at peace with one another. Thus, we needed to recognize the diversity of the objective and subjective orientations within apologetics, which in turn were reflections on and sometimes Christian responses to the cultural milieu in which the Christian communities found themselves.
However, the historical and orthodox Christian faith, in all its inflections and traditions, has always had those who believed that there was an intellectual challenge implicit in the message of the scriptures which had reached a loud crescendo in the person and words of Jesus of Nazareth. Taken at face value, the words of Jesus demanded of us a personal response and a choice to take up our own cross of Calvary with its implicit ridicule, pain, and shame but also the crucifixion of the flesh and the receiving of a new nature born of the Spirit of God. The greatest apostle of the Christian faith, St. Paul, in the magisterial letters we now call the Book of Romans and the Book of Hebrews, should also be recognized as presenting some of the finest intellectual defenses of those words and some of the finest diagnoses of the defective psychology of the human condition which was later to prove so influential on Augustine as he agonized over stealing pears that he did not even like; for him he stole because he wanted to steal and that “wanting to steal” was the problem of fallen humanity that Christian philosophy must answer and which Paul had first addressed.
We thus chose to use the Van Tillian term “epistemological self-consciousness” as it encapsulated well the central proposition of this work that the conception of an authentic Christian philosophy must be able to articulate and defend its position in a manner consistent with the philosophical presuppositions and praxis or phenomenology of the Christian faith. In conducting the research for this work, it became evident that within Christian apologetic philosophy, this would often be considered an extreme position. Modern apologetics, particularly in the Anglo-American Protestant tradition since the establishment of the great American colleges in the Colonies, had favored philosophical traditions drawing from commonsense realism, empiricism and evidentialism, responding to an increasingly naturalistic conception of science and rationality more generally. It became overwhelmingly dominated by a perception that there was somewhere a neutral, common ground upon which we could meet and then resolve the differences on the basis of a common rationality.
The Christian “worldview” was then simply a “conceptual scheme” which one was free to accept or reject as one weighed the evidence for and against; the Christian praxis was steadily divorced from its reasons. We found that the greatest challenge to this form of apologetics came with the publication of Darwin’s thesis. On the basis of empirical observations and common sense, Darwin proposed a naturalistic rationale that contradicted the Christian metaphysics. This led to the rise of liberalism, and other forms of subjective apologetics because the evidence which seemed to demand a verdict, the scientific account, the commonsense account, refuted the traditional religious account. The great Protestant universities, built on a foundation that believed the faith it defended was a rational faith, seemed compelled to abandon their traditional positions, in some cases ceding first to Unitarianism (as in Harvard and Yale) and others secularized completely; the only evidence they were once Christian institutions would be in their insignia and motto (as in Columbia College, New York).
This was clearly an affront to orthodox Christian praxis and spirituality, we cannot ignore these spiritual dimensions in the name of philosophical or academic respectability and acceptability, or it has then compromised itself. Thus, through this work, our conception of the Christian “worldview” was developed into a far stronger conception than a “conceptual scheme”, it has fundamental ontological, epistemological, and ethical commitments. We argued that the traditional problem of the circularity problem between metaphysics and epistemology are resolved in the Christian commitments, given full expression in the inscripturation process. The transcendental of a God both transcendent and immanent, present in Spirit but dwelling in eternity, as reconciling the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular,’ is able to substantively ground philosophy. Though some reticence to the Trinitarian concept as foundational to Christian philosophy has to be recognized because it is argued as an intellectual innovation in the early centuries of the church, such reticence was not compelling for us.
We concluded that transcendental logic makes it tenable that even accepting a conclusion was an inference from scripture, assuming a pattern of reasoning we were seeking to establish, that this would not be problematic for us. Transcendental reasoning concludes that this circularity is not objectionable as reasoning assuming ultimate authorities could not proceed in any other manner. Another important conclusion for us was that we are able to strengthen our confidence in reason by considering that one of the principles we recognized as present in Van Til in which he agreed with the great neo-Calvinist Kuyper, and which can be traced directly to both Calvin and recognized in seminal form in Augustine and thus present in some streams of Catholicism also, was that to the degree even the rebellious honor the image of God within their intellect, they will produce genuine science. That is, there is no requirement that knowledge only originates with the regenerate and truth can be appreciated and valued wherever it is found.
This established an important and pluralistic conclusion, but equally this is not to assert that sin has no noetic effects or to deny the wider Christian and scriptural imperative of salvation. One of Van Til’s sharpest arguments we considered in this work was in the reconciliation of the opposing positions of Warfield and Kuyper, where his apologetic asserts that the full rational autonomy claimed by Warfield for the unbeliever is impossible without faith; faith must be the foundation for claims to rationality and not vice versa. He departed fundamentally from Kant in this respect also; Kant would argue, in some ways echoing Descartes’ confidence in an unadulterated access to internal mental states, that rational autonomy was a prerequisite of being able to submit to the moral law of God. In contrast, Van Til’s important conclusion was that Special and General revelation dovetail together; the scriptures at once sort out our thinking and renew our mind but the operation of salvific grace is a prerequisite of receiving that renewal through the scriptures.
In that sense we might also agree that the scriptures give an account for what is already present, but they also bring to the present what is not yet present. Without the scriptures there can be no renewing of the mind, it is always a commitment to the propositional challenge of a heart believing and the mouth confessing that distinguishes the regenerate from the unregenerate. That is, there are no “anonymous Christians” [1] though there might be many of different faiths that would readily believe the Christian message on the basis of the general consciousness of God within their own conscience that the scriptures also recognize in Romans 2, which is why there is a mandate to preach to all nations in Romans 10. This is what I believe Paul meant in Romans when the Gentiles are a law to themselves when they have responded to the immanent knowledge of God by the virtue of being human (Rom 2:14-15). Thus, importantly, and significantly, if a philosophy has a conclusion or a principle that is in harmony with scripture, whether consciously or unconsciously, reason has behaved in a non-autonomous manner, irrespective of any conscious religious commitment. We must recognize in conclusion that our conception of “autonomous reason” must be understood in a specific, theory-laden manner distinct from the Kantian sense, the regenerate in spirit are not necessarily regenerate in mind. The former might be considered to be of punctiliar aspect (the logic of salvation expressed in Rom 10:8-9); the latter of the continual present aspect, the discipline of the Christian life.
Thus, because of this overlap there is still the interesting discussion possible at this point that because we know the truth of the Christian worldview in a transcendental sense, we then make scripture incidental. However, the Christian worldview emphasizes the importance of regeneration through baptism, living a life of repentance and of the supreme importance the “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:2; 2 Cor 10:4-6). This “renewal” is both a rational operation and a spiritual one, but these are an integrated, irreducible parts of a whole. When Jesus talked about “rivers of living water flowing” out of the “innermost being” (Joh 7:37-38), we have a figure of a noetic renewal. Similarly, when Paul spoke of “pulling down strongholds” (2 Cor 10:4) he was not talking about supernatural structures in the heavenly realms[2] but a conscious, epistemological methodology where every thought and intent of the heart is tested against the scripture: we “tear down arguments” (v4, NET) that are “raised up against the knowledge of [from] God” [3] and “we take every thought captive to make it obey Christ.” [4] Thus, we can formally agree scripture is accounting for what is already present and its purpose is to sort out our thinking, but scripture is never merely incidental to the Christian life but central to it.
This was also why we needed in this work to distinguish between representing Christianity merely as a “conceptual scheme” and emphasizing it as a “worldview.” However, because of its wider appropriation within non-Augustinian Christian philosophy, we discovered that even the concept of “worldview” has been misunderstood in purely rational terms as a more elaborate conceptual map attempting to present a more full-bodied and coherent conception of what it means to be a Christian; that is, an improved or more rigorous conceptual scheme. We have seen that because modern literature has tended to conflate conceptual scheme and worldview, with philosophers preferring the former and theologians the latter, the critical difference between the two has been sublimated to the detriment of genuine spirituality. This is why the challenge of Jesus was most forcefully made with his identification as “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Joh 14:6). The key word here is the “comes,” this is not just a one-time salvation event but a lifestyle of communion with the Father; this is the emphasis of the narrative of the entire chapter. Thus, one of our strongest conclusions must be the importance of engaging in worldview apologetics but not merely in the formal sense that has characterized much of Augustinian apologetics, both in the Reformed and Catholic traditions, but also to give attention to the phenomenology and the spirituality of Christian life. This was perhaps a contra-intuitive conclusion for us to reach in a thesis concerned primarily with a rational defense of the faith.
In summary, we should conclude there are different senses of knowledge that must be recognized, we can have knowledge about God and from God, without having a saving knowledge of God and a communion with God. We might indeed formally acknowledge that there is a transcendental sense in which the Christian conceptual scheme is assumed by all, or better that the Christian conceptual scheme provides all with the basis for whatever intelligibility there is in a worldview, which is one of our primary claims argued within this work. Yet, the full Christian worldview, or a completed knowledge of God, is only known when salvation has been received, knowing God through the salvific exchange of an individual’s belief and confession as a matter of volition. This still raises some difficult issues regarding those who are disadvantaged through physical or mental disease or dysfunction, but this would rather appear to be an issue of Christian praxis and the ministry of the church in the world, where healing and deliverance were considered as part of the ministry to people suffering in that way, rather than epistemology. Some of the intellectual paradoxes for Christians perhaps result from Christians not behaving as they were instructed to do so from within the gospel scriptures and the Book of Acts.
8.2.4 Transcendentalism and TAG
One of the important questions we asked philosophically was, are all my answers private answers, or is there a public, objective world which we all can reach? Following neo-Kantian Strawson, our beliefs in the regularities of nature were transcendentally necessary, they were not reasoned to in an inductive or deductive sense, they were commitments we did not choose, and it was idle (in the sense of doing no useful work) to reason either in confirmation or disconfirmation. We can certainly agree with Strawson, but his conclusions are piecemeal and parochial; by considering a broader critique of the wider conception of reason and rationality which can only be grounded for us normatively from scripture, we found transcendentalism was defensible if and only if, the context was Christian. This helped us establish further that our philosophical choices are at base ethical, these are choices that we make.
To proceed we needed to find a transcendental that justified these transcendentals which we posited as the triune, transcendent God unique to Christianity. This was a strong claim and not without problematics, our central pivot being a perception regarding the division of reason between an autonomous reason that proceeds on a basis independent of a reference to scripture; and a reason that proceeds recognizing scripture as providing its foundation. We can recognize, formally, that an autonomy of reason would seem to be a prerequisite for one to freely submit to God’s Law; it would need to be our choice to be a moral choice, and, on that basis, God would be just in His judgment of us. However, we concluded that non-Christian logic had already invaded our thinking here, both Van Til and Plantinga recognized that sin has noetic effects, and we should argue that it is God’s grace that is a prerequisite of even our being able to make that free choice, let alone fully appreciate the moral quality of that choice as a Creator would demand of it.
This would seem to be the implication of John 6:44, the prerogative is God’s choice and not ours; the Greek verb used in this verse where most English versions use “draw” is better translated “drag.” This is why we needed to consider at length what we called the Christian Presupposition, which was our complex mix of theological and philosophical variables to map what Van Til called “analogical thinking” by which he did not mean, as his critics wrongly represented him as saying, that our thinking gives us an analogy of God or the world (for we really do know God and the world) but in the sense that how a creature knows as contrasted with how the Creator knows. There is a qualitative difference between when we know an object and God’s knowledge of it, for God knowing it makes it what it is: God’s knowledge is constitutive in this regard, ours remains derivative. The autonomous reason for Van Til is defined as that which considers itself constitutive or definitive, even if definitively skeptical; reason properly employed as a tool defers to the authority of scripture.
Thus, we should conclude that our final definition of autonomous reason we have developed is that which judges not just on the basis of right/wrong and truth/falsehood but on the basis that it operates outside the constraints of scripture that delineate its legitimate operation. Illegitimate operations are an abstract mode of reasoning, rightly described by scripture as “vain and deceitful” (Col 2:8), considered an operation defining its own content and context. If a philosophy has a principle or a conclusion and it is oppositional to scripture, this vanity is self-evident; however, even a skeptical conclusion that wishes to suspend judgement, has taken an autonomous posture if scripture speaks on that matter. So, for example, we considered that even asking the question “does God exist” imports in a conception of reason that is vainly autonomous, for it assumed that possibility is more ultimate than God himself; rather, possibility is what it is because God exists.
Thus, it is not merely a general orientation of reason, though that is a helpful beginning point, but also a criterion of evaluation of individual acts of reason. Scripture in its narrative speaks to the whole of human life. That is why we asserted a Christian and a non-Christian worldview rather than “worldviews,” they have a unity at a base level. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which our wills and our choices are always our own and our conscience, as Paul notes, is always standing ready to accuse us but can be suppressed in unrighteousness (Rom 1:18). We want to formally agree with Kant that a prerequisite of freedom is the autonomy of the individual but that will only be a result of grace. Kant was insufficiently rigorous to recognize that a conscience can be “seared” (1Tim 4:2) such that it is no longer capable of recognizing right or wrong, truth and falsehood as God would define it; but that it would be functioning in defining its own versions of right and wrong. It is equally autonomous if it denies in skepticism we can know right or wrong.
We then made extensive use of Plantinga who enabled us to arrive convincingly at the reasonableness of Christian belief as an epistemic option. Once classical foundationalism was shown to be untenable, it allowed us to establish that it is perfectly legitimate for a Christian community to decide which beliefs were basic for itself. The essence of Plantinga’s position was to provide a notion of warrant which was established on an externalistic basis, in contrast to the internalism of evidentialism that derives from its classical foundationalist basis. This thus provided us with the conclusion that an apologetic defense needed to proceed on a similar basis. Plantinga’s final form of reliabilism posited that warranted belief originates in cognitive faculties that are functioning properly, in a suitable environment, according to a design plan successfully aimed at producing true beliefs. This we understood as a fortified version of Reidian commonsense realism, addressing at great length the inadequacies of the commonsense concept in contrast to the naïve, evidentialist appropriation of Reid.
However, we noted that Plantinga himself had the final position that he did not believe it was philosophically possible to prove that God existed, using premises that would be accepted by all or even nearly all; though he did, importantly, assert that the arguments were as strong as philosophical arguments could be, giving substantive de jure grounds for Christian belief. Thus, it was necessary for us to posit and evaluate Van Til’s contention that only with a transcendental argument would it be possible to proceed any further to offer a proof for the de facto necessity of the Christian worldview and to be able to defend any claim to a fully rational philosophy. The potential for the transcendental argument to proceed from a necessary conceptual logical premise which establishes a necessary reliance on a contested conceptual logical claim, provided the basis for our application of the method.
Our final argument in this mode was thus simple and elegant, the Christian worldview provides the intelligibility for all predications; that is, in attempting to argue against the Christian worldview, the worldview must be assumed. This was much like Aristotle’s first recorded use of a transcendental argument to justify logic; in attempting to deny logic he argued you were employing it. This long pedigree of the argument form and its recent use in the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, Searle, Strawson and others served to establish its legitimacy in the face of criticisms. We identified a set of objections and noted that all but one could be robustly answered in a straightforward and convincing manner once the transcendental nature of the argument was properly understood. We examined the final objection that was considered the strongest objection associated with the famous criticism of Stroud against Strawson that asserted that the most a transcendental argument could accomplish was to demonstrate the conceptual necessity to view the world in a particular way, it did not establish the ontological necessity.
That is, the implication being that the most the TAG could accomplish was to demonstrate the conceptual necessity of belief in the Christian God to be fully rational, it did not establish that the Christian God did, in fact, exist. Whilst we might consider the TAG as in actuality accomplishing the narrow apologetic task of providing a rational defense of Christianity, the thorough going sceptic is still left with a final, admittedly desperate out and they could assert that they were prepared to accept the explicit irrationality of the world and live believing that attempts to describe the universe in rational terms were illegitimate and arbitrary. This paralogical position has an undeniable cultural presence; that is, in some respects we noted it was distinctive of the postmodern mood, as well as a position in the skeptical conclusions of some analytical philosophers.
Thus, we felt compelled to engage further to see if it was possible to strengthen the argument. The attempt of Van Tillian Butler to answer this objection relied on a theological move regarding the distinction between conceptual scheme and worldview that whilst permissible and legitimate, was not wholly satisfactory for us. We examined another possible solution which relied on further analysis of the nature of transcendental argument and found a plausible solution to the final objection that relied on research from several recent philosophers that argued that the verification principle was capable of a transcendental justification, most famously as employed by McDowell in his Mind and World. This work was notable as being considered acceptable to the analytic philosophical tradition whilst employing modes of thought more readily associated with the continental tradition. It was thus considered to have considerable weight as a solution. With such a justification, it is no longer the self-refuting principle of empiricism but provided the necessary bridge between the way the world is and how it is conceived to be. However, we learnt from our analysis that the transcendental principle cannot stand alone, it needs the transcendent transcendental of the Trinity to provide the ontological bridge, to render coherent the derivative transcendentals.
With the necessity of Christian belief established, we then probed further the relevance of our programme for Christian political philosophy. We noted that philosophical categories were articulated with ethical assumptions and that metaphysics and epistemological categories were interdependent. Considering them as abstract categories could never resolve this circularity. Only by considering scripture as encapsulating unifying principles, could we establish a substantive basis, and we concluded that Christian involvement was mandated on a theonomical basis. The narratives of scripture provide the raw material from which principles were both stated and explicated in their application. We recognize that whilst our cultural situation is different than ancient Israel and the outworking of those principles would be different, they were nevertheless still legitimate principles for us today. The ethical problems of humanity might be nuanced by our technological context but remain those explored in scripture. Thus, epistemological self-consciousness concludes that our conception stated at the beginning of our thesis, that philosophy should be transformative, was legitimate and has been defended successfully.
8.3 The Contribution of Our Thesis as Original Research
8.3.1 As Augustinian Apologetics
In the introductory sections we argued that we were approaching the subject of philosophy in what was considered the Augustinian tradition. This asserts that faith should provide the foundation for reason in contrast to the (neo-)Thomist position that reason should be preferred if there was a conflict between the two or if knowledge was possible to humanity by either route. We built on the work of the Dutch Reformed tradition which itself relied on the Calvinistic Reformers and thus Augustine. However, it was an unexpected discovery during the research regarding the nuances of Thomist thought and the important developments of Augustinian thought by those considered formally as Thomists. It was initially envisaged that it would have been primarily by considering the contribution of Reformed thinkers that we would have presented a conception of Christian philosophy that we have argued is faithful to that which is implicit in the scriptures. We discovered that the Catholic contribution to Augustinian thought should not be underestimated.
That is, internal High Church politics has obfuscated the philosophical contribution of those within Catholicism which sought to return to a more rigorous Augustinianism. As an example, we saw that Leo XIII in 1879 had issued a papal bull that made it mandatory for Catholic institutions to teach Aquinas as the “only right [philosopher].” This has not been remitted and so philosophers within the Catholic communion that wish to innovate needed to tie their work to Aquinas in some way, either as demonstrating that previous interpretations of Aquinas were erroneous or that they were clarifying or developing his thought. Even in the 20th century, Catholic theologians and philosophers have suffered censure for their straying from orthodoxy, including Henri Lubac whom we featured as a modern Augustinian within the Catholic communion that we would certainly want to include within those seeking an authentic defense of the Christian worldview and faith.[5]
That is, we have discovered a common foundation for those who believe that Christianity should be defended in a manner consistent with the faith outside the denominational constraints. At the same time, we have drawn a clear distinction between apologetic traditions that proceeded on a classical foundationalist basis such as evidentialism and ‘classical’ neo-Thomist apologetics which used teleological and cosmological arguments. We demonstrated the philosophical inadequacy of this methodology even though it had been employed and is still employed in defending the faith. Our important distinction was that such arguments were useful within the faith but not as logical proofs. We did this by explicating the incommensurable nature of the epistemological assumptions at the basis of these views with the Christian worldview.
8.3.2 In Opposition to Scientism
We presented an analysis that demonstrated that philosophy in the 19th century had become dominated by the liberalism and naturalism in response to the crisis precipitated by the Darwinian conception of humanity. We articulated the failure of the naturalistic philosophy that flowed from this position and debunked our dominant cultural narrative of science as somehow implicitly naturalistic and authoritative whenever it comes into conflict with the Christian worldview. We stood in direct opposition to the view that elevated scientific questions as the only questions worth asking by exposing the fallacious verificationism and question-begging at the heart of that view.
Further, by considering the best science had to offer in evolutionary thought and in quantum physics, we demonstrated the epistemological inadequacy of the various naturalisms, and the various category mistakes made in attempting to generalize “chance” as a metaphysical principle. In particular, by exposing that one of the most senior mathematical physicists alive today believed that quantum physics was failing to offer any meaningful description of reality, we can conclude epistemic authority and right to our own position as achieving much more.
8.3.3 As Synthesis of Van Til and Plantinga
We noted that a revival in Christian philosophy occurred in Calvin college in the 1930s onwards as Jellema inspired the two philosophers who articulated the need for a distinctively Christian philosophy most strongly. Both claimed to be articulating a Christian philosophy rather than just being philosophy by those who identified as philosophers who were Christians. One was rigorously analytic in their approach, and one had employed the language and methods of idealism. These two philosophers were Alvin Plantinga and Cornelius Van Til.
Although both men had very similar aims and had considerable overlap in their careers and had been taught in the same institution by the same professor that had profoundly influenced them both, there was no direct interchange between them and there was only a single reference to Van Til in Plantinga’s entire corpus and none to Plantinga in Van Til’s corpus. We noted that the Christian analytic tradition that experienced a renaissance primarily because of the influence of Plantinga, had senior members that were extremely dismissive of Van Til with some refusing even to acknowledge him as a philosopher.
Whilst there had been notable attempts by Anderson and Oliphint [6] to correct some of the misunderstandings and to demonstrate linkages between their work, we have endeavored to demonstrate more fully that these distinct streams are not in an adversarial mode but should be considered as complimentary because they both articulated very similar presuppositions. We identified considerable overlooked linkages between their epistemologies and our key innovation was to dovetail the two together to strengthen the argument for a distinctively Christian philosophy that not only argued for the rationality of the position but provided an argument for the necessity of the Christian worldview as a prerequisite of rationality. We found that there was considerably more in common between the positions than was previously accepted; this was partially explained by linguistic issues, with Van Til’s philosophical training belonging to a generation that favored idealism, whereas Plantinga was rigorously analytic in his approach.
We discovered that Van Tillians can readily endorse and use Plantinga’s critiques of foundationalism and naturalism, can benefit from his discussion of evidence, internalism, reliabilism, and externalism in fortifying their own position. We also emphasized that Van Til’s position had been importantly misrepresented and misjudged by his analytic critics as suggested by Plantinga’s single reference to him, though the reference might more charitably be considered as targeting the inelegant use some of Van Til’s disciples had made of his work. The characterization of Van Til’s work as asserting that “unbelievers could not know anything” was unequivocally incorrect because it omitted the second part of his quote “if they were consistent with their epistemological presuppositions”; central to Van Til’s apologetic was rather that unbelievers were not consistent and that was a point of contact with them, allowing reasoning with them.
This was his novel appropriation and reconciliation of the rival conceptions of Kuyper and Warfield regarding apologetic philosophy; he accepted their basic premises but considered their conclusions as fallacious. We found that because of Van Til’s agreement with Warfield that Christianity was objectively provable, his position was precisely the opposite to the fideism that some of his critics accuse him of. Indeed, his position was an important innovation from the fideist terminus of others in the Dutch Reformed church such as Kuyper, who strongly asserted the incommensurable nature of believing and unbelieving “science” (which for Kuyper, as for us, encompassed the whole of human knowledge) and the impossibility of reconciling them; Kuyper was one of the finest expositors of a Calvinism fit for modernity and in opposition to modernism.
Part of the genius of Van Til was his reconciliation and synthesis of apparently contradictory positions to create a far more robust and philosophically rigorous and coherent apologetic. However, and in contrast to Plantinga, his influence has been far more muted, and his work rarely considered outside of narrow Reformed circles and even within those narrow boundaries, controversially so. This we suggested was perhaps best explained by the lack of the propagation of his work in the wider literature, his long tenure at a single institution and his routine publishing in the in-house journals, which has meant his work has not been generally considered even within the Christian philosophical circles.
Thus, it is hoped that this work succeeds in commending the work of Van Til to those interested in Christian philosophy who would otherwise only encounter an inaccurate caricature of his work and that it goes some way to repairing his reputation in the eyes of those familiar with the work of Plantinga. They are flip sides of the same philosophical project which is to articulate a Christian philosophy consistent with the faith itself, rather than based on epistemologies borrowed from the non-Christian world. As was noted by the analytical Christian philosopher Craig, the positions had a surprising degree of convergence as Plantinga’s philosophy might also be perceived of moving in a transcendental direction.
8.4 The Wider Relevance of the Research
8.4.1 As Van Tillian Scholarship
As a more general elaboration as the point above, it was striking to me during the research as to how sparsely Van Til’s work was even acknowledged in Christian philosophy. Whereas Plantinga gets good coverage, perhaps reflecting his status not just in Christian philosophy but as a former president of the APA and a recipient of the Tempelton Prize in 2017, Van Til seldom gets mentioned. Even in introductory works on philosophy by Christians that include most major philosophical figures from Ancient Greece onwards, he is conspicuously absent.[7] Now this might uncharitably be explained in that Van Til’s work was of insufficient quality to merit serious consideration, but this claim does not stand up to scrutiny as we have repeatedly demonstrated through this work. Most notably in that respect, the famous Princeton metaphysician A.A. Bowman had recognized Van Til as having exceptional skill in metaphysical analysis and had offered Van Til a fellowship which allowed him to complete his doctoral work. Similarly, it is of note that even some of Van Til’s fiercest critics complemented Van Til on his analysis and exposure of neo-Orthodoxy, being the first within the wider evangelical community to explicate it as a departure from orthodox Christianity.
We concluded it was thus incoherent for the students of those same critics to later accuse him of being neo-orthodox, and it demonstrated no understanding of Van Til’s transcendentalism. Similarly, Van Til was also readily misunderstood because he was trained within the framework of idealist philosophy whereas most of the development in Christian philosophy in the 20th century was more in line with the analytical mode of thought. Rather, we should conclude that one of the challenges with Van Tillian scholarship has been reflected in that Van Til had an enormous corpus of class syllabi, articles, and reviews but perhaps only a single book (Van Til (2008)) which would be considered a synoptic summary of his position. Although he had three major books published during his lifetime, two of those dealt specifically with neo-Orthodoxy as heterodox rather than his overall apologetic system.
This clearly indicated that there has been a lack of understanding of Van Til, even among those closest to him in claiming the Reformed moniker. It was only after Van Til passed that some of his disciples attempted to systematize his work and present the revolutionary nature of his thought. We discovered that the most effective account was found in Bahnsen (1998) which is recognized as Bahnsen’s opus magnus in which he demonstrates the profound and systematic nature of Van Til’s thought whilst recognizing the density of Van Til’s prose and his sometimes-clumsy English idiom, being at least partially explained because English was his second language. However, Bahnsen’s exposition of Van Til extends to 800 pages and many of those are packed with footnotes; it is a challenging read. Thus, in such a work as presented here, where we employed an analytic framework but managed to integrate Van Tillian transcendental logic to move from a discussion of probabilities to certainties when discussing the existence of God and the rational justification of Christian belief, it is hoped that the power of his method has been made available to a new generation of analytically minded apologists. Our philosophical preferences and prejudices should not prevent us from recognizing that Van Til belonged to a tradition of uncompromising believers such as Tertullian, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Warfield, and Kuyper who not only clearly recognized the antithesis between believer and unbeliever but understood that a distinctively Christian philosophy of life was to be worked out from the scriptures.
8.4.2 Christian Ethics
We recognized that the questions of ethics are sometimes phrased in terms of ‘how should we then live?’. I first engaged seriously with the concept of a distinctively Christian ethical position during my master’s studies which itself had resulted from a frustration with the insipid political philosophy I was encountering as a believer. Thus, one of the foundational principles we posited at the beginning of this thesis was the belief that philosophy should be transformational, and we have worked at establishing that position. Whilst I experienced some pushback on that assertion when writing and being examined on this work, it remains to me a self-evident principle. The culture and society we have now has developed from philosophies first articulated in an academy, which are often then admittedly bastardised but are then pushed into popular culture by public intellectuals with a transformative agenda.
The thesis of this work was a call back for believers to understand their faith extends to every part of their life and that they are to “occupy till [He] comes” (Luk 19:13); that is, do the business of life, do politics, do sociology, do psychology, and do philosophy, to manage every compartment or sphere of creation.[8] When we recognize that each worldview operates on circular assumptions, we understand that there is no tyranny of science or secularism that should intimidate us but that we can stand on our own intellectual feet without the aid of epistemological crutches borrowed from oppositional forms of life. With transcendental logic, we have a tool with which we can evaluate oppositional forms of life for coherence and correspondence on their own terms. That is, this work endeavors to give the Christian the self-confidence to defend their faith robustly that they can stand in the face of the severest critic, be they the atheistic scientist, a thoroughgoing sceptic, or a mystic. As my background is in the sciences and engineering, I specifically gave attention to naturalistic science, both evolutionary science and physics, to demonstrate that neither give a coherent or convincing account that provides an epistemic mandate to prefer and defer to them.
Thus, our final confidence should be that we have a rational defense of the faith, and we have established that the scriptures are trustworthy in asserting that we are capable of a rational defense of our faith should any demand it of us (1 Pe 3:15). I personally hope to have stirred the confidence in the post-Reformational view of the world and faith. The world-changing nature of the Reformation resulted from its worldview, it was an entire philosophy of life rather than a piecemeal call to revivalism or evangelism whilst the rest of culture atrophied in striking contrast to the evangelical and fundamentalist world of the late 19th century to the early 1970s (see the next section). Things are slightly better now, but the emphasis is on the “slight.” It is hoped we have part of the antidote to the aggressive evangelism of the liberals that seek to establish that “good is evil and evil is good” (Isa 5:20); that we have an equally robust belief in the good and have provided a philosophically satisfying exposition of it.
8.4.3 As Political Philosophy
There was an undeniable crisis in Christian political philosophy in the opening decades of the 20th century. There had been an all-out confrontation with the theological liberalism of Schleiermacher and the political Liberalism that was correlative with it. With the Scopes’ trial regarding the teaching of scientific evolutionism, there was a substantial cultural and academic challenge to the religious narratives and the Fundamentalist response was to withdraw into a cultural ghetto for almost half a century. Similarly, the Reformed world fragmented into orthodox and liberal wings. It was only to be with the Reconstructionist movement of the 1970s that emerged as a sociological application of Van Tillianism, that the legitimacy of evangelical Christianity to engage in the wider cultural debates and the political sphere was once more legitimized.[9] However, although the influence of this movement was substantive with significant sister movements or individuals adopting the programme whilst avoiding the controversy associated with its Reformed emphases and the label ‘Dominion Theology,’ an articulation of a coherent political philosophy within the charismatic and prophetic movements has been virtually non-existent.
Thus, with our attention to the critical contemporary context of the post-pandemic environment and the challenge of the Trump era, we have helpfully focused on some of the key basic principles and imperatives for reestablishing the principles for involvement. We have, as part of a wider philosophical vision, directly challenged the insipid political agnosticism that has been argued by some influential figures within the charismatic and prophetic movements.[10] We have forcefully argued for both an individual responsibility and an institutional involvement, recognizing the different dynamics of both and making the important distinction between the unique theocratic application of divine principles in ancient Israel and the application of those same principles in modern representative models of government. We argued that the principles of governance in Scripture were representative rather than monarchical and thus we should value our republican and democratic models of government. We have emphasized, remembering the dictum of Kuyper who rejected the secular-religious dichotomy, that our Christian life is an integrated whole and that includes our political relationships.
8.5 Limitations to this Research
The latter stages of the creation of this work inevitably highlighted its shortcomings, especially in the eyes of those most qualified to pass judgment. Whilst a major attempt was made to address these criticisms and improve the quality of the work, which I believe was largely successful, some of these bear rehearsing as they are pertinent and salient to the wider project.[11] This work was presenting a vision of Christian philosophy, and it was attempting to do so in as broad a manner as possible, acknowledging as many features as possible of the philosophical landscape. This was primarily to indicate our awareness of these schools and the potential for their criticisms of the views presented here and to highlight what were believed to be fundamental weaknesses in their positions.
However, this broad vista has meant that insufficient detail has perhaps been given to those perspectives and the criticisms I have made are then vulnerable themselves to invalidation. This is particularly the case with philosophies that might be identified as within the Continental school such as existentialism and phenomenology, as well as what might be called “postmodern” philosophy. Similarly, sections which discuss Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism would require a greater depth to fully do them justice.[12] So, in summary, there remains a large corpus of extant literature, both religious and philosophical, which would need to be discussed to strengthen our claims regarding the transcendental claim that Christianity provides the basis for all ‘predication.’
It was also noted by one reviewer that philosophies which deny reason a strong role regarding right/wrong and truth/falsehood (that is, have a weaker conception of reason) are less vulnerable to Van Til’s central claim that it is the autonomy of reason which unifies non-Christian views and thus it does not follow that only the Christian view is coherent. Whilst this criticism was addressed to a degree in later drafts and more attention was given to religious experience and subjective aspects of epistemology, there is still more to be done in clarifying precisely what is understood to be “autonomous reasoning.” I believe it is particularly helpful in this regard that we formulate our understanding of autonomous reasoning as “abstract” reasoning, an operation without Christian content or context. Our strongest claim was that reasoning can never proceed coherently on that basis but collapses into irrationality. We must always remember our worldview context and further work should be done in this regard.
The most important limitation which was highlighted on review and which I addressed at some length in the later drafts, was the role of religious experience and its relationship to epistemological self-consciousness; that is, the wider conception of knowledge construction that might be considered intuitive or direct. In some senses, the rational defense of Christianity might be considered illegitimate in principle (as argued by Kierkegaard) or must be heavily qualified as to what it seeks to achieve (the competency of reason.) I acknowledged that it is certainly the case that rational argument did not directly lead to my own conversion but equally I do believe rational argument helped me towards conversion and has most certainly helped to keep me converted in the sense of maintaining my Christianity as front and center of my life, rather than relegated to some personal, private “experience” inadequate as a philosophy of public life. Further development of this theme would certainly benefit the overall conception of Christian philosophy. It is hoped to consider this more in future development of this work.
Thus, on a conservative assessment of the thesis presented here, rather than establishing our argument in its entirety, the most we can claim is to have taken several very important steps towards the aim of presenting an objective proof of the necessity of the Christian worldview. We would need to carefully consider the Continental tradition and offer a fuller account of the autonomy of reason. Yet, our achievements are substantial, in addressing skepticism, the tyranny of science, the rationality of the Christian worldview, setting the necessity of a transcendental context for the defense of the faith, and in setting forth the TAG itself and answering its common criticisms.
Finally, it is also important to recognize the distinction between proof and persuasion when judging the efficacy of this work. Of course, a rigorous proof is instinctively thought of as being persuasive, but part of our thesis has been to argue that presuppositions, prejudices, psychological factors, sociological conditions, personal experience, and our spirituality all have a bearing on what we finally decide to believe. As Wittgenstein discovered at the end of his Tractatus, the answers to what was really important to life seemed to lie outside of expressible language; Lyotard would also regard the philosophic enterprise as trying to bring the inexpressible to expression. So, although we have wanted to convey confidence and certainty through the reasonings of our work here, we cannot claim infallibility, but we can hope to have made a substantive contribution to the issues explored.
8.6 Recommendation for Further Research
In examining and evaluating the challenges to the TAG, the greatest difficulty, first articulated by Stroud, was in the move from conceptual necessity to ontological necessity. Our final solution was a semi-novel one based on the application of an argument which established what we required as a by-product of a complex transcendental argument made by McDowell on what makes empirical knowledge possible, rather than arguing for our position directly. What is particularly interesting surrounding the literature for McDowell is that though his work was welcomed into analytic philosophy, it borrowed heavily from the Continental school with the result that even a Rorty would describe it as “cryptic.” In a follow-up volume which was an exchange between McDowell and his peers (Smith (Ed.), 2002), it was evident as to how difficult it was to understand McDowell as he had intended. McDowell himself wrote a follow-up volume, Having the World in View, in which it is clear he borrows from both Hegel and Sellars to provide a novel synthesis of both traditions.
To my knowledge, though this was first advanced as a possible solution by Baird (2003), there has been no detailed criticism or analysis of this solution within the proponents of TAG. With the complexity and nuances within McDowell’s work, with which he himself acknowledges he receives criticism from both sides of the philosophic divide, this is certainly an area that requires further examination and validation. If successful, it would certainly strengthen the claims of TAG as offering a more generally acceptable proof for not just the conceptual necessity of the Christian God as the prerequisite of rationality but the ontological necessity also.
[1] Although not considered in the body of the thesis, the concept of an anonymous Christian was associated most directly with Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984). It is easy to mischaracterize Rahner as merely arguing for universalism and “all will be saved” but this would be a strawman misrepresentation; as with much Catholic theology, it requires detailed study to be properly understood before criticism. It is far more nuanced than the popular parody.
[2] I was repeatedly taught over the years that “strongholds” were spiritual kingdoms that dominated the natural world. Such a conception is arguably the subject of Eph 6:12 ff. and a repeated motif throughout the book of Daniel, particularly in those narratives where Daniel specifically is being shown visions in the heavenly realm. However, the context of 2Co 10 is clear and is talking about patterns of thought and the discipline of testing them for coherence with and correspondence to the Christian worldview.
[3] 2 Cor 10:5 (NET) with my amplification. Here I believe it is appropriate to consider the genitive in the ablative sense.
[4] Here the translators of the NET consider the genitive clause as having an objective sense with Christ as the object. Many other translations stay “neutral” and render it simply as “every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” which is rather clumsy English and does not help to make the intended sense clear.
[5] As these theologians and philosophers are often within a school or community, this censure meant that they are unable to teach or publish until the censure is remitted or overruled by a new Pope (as was the case with Lubac). Of course, censure for unorthodoxy is also common (and can be uglier) within the Reformed communion; and normally erupts to scandal in the more evangelical and charismatic churches. The latter tend to favor a decentralized model of government that can fail to arrest aberrations both of doctrine and behavior before they become scandalous.
[6] Scott Oliphint is professor of apologetics and systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, the institution at which Van Til spent virtually all his career. He is known as a Van Tillian, though perhaps quietly and uncontroversially so, and has been involved in editing and introductory sections to the new editions of Van Til, also writing an interesting foreword to Bosserman, Paradox, who explicated the doctrine and role of the Trinity in Van Tillian thought. I have not directly considered the work of Oliphint in this book with respect to Plantinga as this seems to be a minor aspect of his work though he did offer a lucid introductory commentary to a section on Plantinga in his apologetic reader, Christian Apologetics. In contrast, Anderson was one of the first scholars who explicitly grasped this nettle and from whom I benefitted in discussing issues surrounding the links between their work.
[7] The notable exception is Frame in his History. This perhaps should not be surprising as Frame was a student of Van Til and became with Bahnsen, one of the most influential expositors of his thought. However, other students of Van Til who went on to become influential apologists relegated him to a single footnote (Carnell) or omitted to mention him entirely (Schaeffer).
[8] πραγματεύσασθε, verb imperative aorist middle 2nd person plural from πραγματεύομαι. This verb has the literal meaning “to trade, to do business.” It occurs only in this verse in the New Testament and so lacks an extended semantic context; many dominion theologians like to interpret it as we would describe an “occupying army” but that would be an unsafe inference. Neither BDAG or Vine admit any possibility of it meaning anything other than to do business, it certainly has no history in the Greek language of this figurative meaning. However, its situational context, certainly implies that Jesus is not talking just about the narrow action of trading but the responsible execution of the occupations of living.
[9] I discussed this historical background, the emergence, influence, and legacy of the Reconstructionist movement in Dominion.
[10] In Politics, I dealt with the subject of politics and involvement more generally considering the defeat of Donald Trump who had held the door open to evangelical Christians for involvement in government unlike any previous president since Washington and Lincoln. The controversy caused within the evangelical and prophetic movements by his defeat was unparalleled with many calling for a withdrawal from political involvement as a reaction. Some of these calls were crude, others were argued with far more care. As a respectful and thorough response to these calls for withdrawal by someone who was mentoring me directly in the prophetic, I attempted to deal with the broader issues of involvement in a systematic and theological manner, examining the history of the church and the interpretation of Romans 13 which is the locus around which most discussion amongst Christians has revolved.
[11] As I noted in the preface, this book was based on my PhD thesis. The external examiner made the following comment in response to the corrections in lieu of the criticisms the examiners had raised after the viva, “Let me add that Mr. MacNeil should be commended for the diligence and care he took in responding to the reports of the examiners. In my estimation, he has done so in an exemplary manner and I am very happy now to approve the thesis.”
[12] However, in all cases I have judged these discussions as nevertheless useful and these can be found online at https://planetmacneil.org/blog/category/thesis/phd-appendices/ .