5 The Christian Presupposition
5.1 The Christian Transcendental as the Only True Transcendental
In the previous section we argued for the validity and indeed the necessity of a transcendental mode of argument. Now let us consider the Christian claim to be the only possible transcendental more fully. Firstly, it is important to note a critical feature of Van Tils’ transcendentalism, Van Til collapses the distinction between non-Christian worldviews as simply one of emphasis, rather than substantive difference. Thus, our previous discussion of worldviews and “forms of life” undergoes a grand synthesis or rarefaction in Van Til to simply the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview. Now where the non-Christian viewpoint is religious, it is seen to collapse into:
- Either a heretical form of Christianity, as in Islam and Rabbinic Judaism [1]—heretical in the sense it asserts a verbal revelation from an absolute God who has given us an absolute scripture. That is, it is aping the Christian worldview in some way, and we posit that because it does not maintain Christianity as a unit, it collapses into incoherence.
- Irrationality or fideism, as in Hinduism, Buddhism, or so-called “primitive” religions or “New Age” [2]
The fundamental conception that Van Til believes establishes the unity of the varieties of non-Christian thought is the “univocal” [3] and autonomous nature of their thought. That is, the mind and intellect of humanity is deemed sufficient apart from God to explain and correctly understand reality.[4] However, Van Til asserts like Kant that natural arguments can only ever establish a God which is a part of nature.[5] Thus, it is only on the basis of a transcendent transcendental of the Trinity both immanent and transcendent that allows our transcendental to offer the possibility of coherence and diversity, necessity and contingency by providing a metaphysical bridge between nature and supernature.
That is, the cornerstone of the Christian presupposition is the ontological Trinity—the Christian resolves the tension between immanence and transcendence [6] by the Holy Spirit from God coming to dwell in the temple of our bodies revealing God to us but preserving God’s personal autonomy and the things which belong to Him alone, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.” [7] For the Judeo-Christian [8] tradition, God has committed to the reliability of natural law until the end of this age, there is both determinism and contingency perfectly resolved in His Universe:
“But I, the LORD, make the following promise: I have made a covenant governing the coming of day and night. I have established the fixed laws governing heaven and earth.” [9]
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants.” [10] (Emphasis added).
It is this metaphysic which is implicitly assumed when anyone wants to argue logically but wants to allow for contingency.
5.2 Contingency and Predestination
Yet, contingency can be a difficult subject for Christians and a source of great disagreement. One of the great divisions in Protestantism is the measure to which a person’s will is “free.” [11] However, we can reconcile the tension by some biblical exegesis. In Acts 13,46-48 we see the passive voice of the Greek verb [12] in v.48 emphasizing the “appointing” was by God to eternal life of the Gentiles but contrasted with the rebellion, i.e., the exercising of their wills against God, of the Jews in v.46:
And Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly and said, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; since you repudiate it, and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles. 47 “For thus the Lord has commanded us, ‘I have placed You as a light for the Gentiles, That You should bring salvation to the end of the earth.'” 48And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
This is all in the context of them rejecting the gospel of salvation which God was offering (and seemingly refused on their own terms), this would seem to be confirmed in 1 Tim 2:3-4:
“Such prayer for all is good and welcomed before God our Savior, since he wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” [13]
Thus, the language of these verses, regardless of the complexities of the debate around freewill, demonstrates that predestination and free will are not mutually exclusive in the logic of God. The implication of this is that a will can be free but is never autonomous, “The spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, Searching all the innermost parts of his being.” [14] That is, the individual person is never separated from access by their creator and never lives independent of their creator, they rather, “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” [15] Van Til thus contrasted philosophical physical, causal determinism with divine sovereignty,[16] with the former a derivative of the latter, not an absolute property.
In essence, when he speaks of the logic of God as the “absolute conditioner,” he understands creation as exhausting absolute novelty within the Trinity, so the one and the many are correlative in the Trinity, this means an absolute God and an absolute scripture. In terms of logical necessity then, the wills of persons or the principles of the natural world do not operate outside of this realm independently in absolute freedom, for it would make both God and scripture subject to the wills of men:
“A God who cannot control history because of countless men with wills not fully dependent on his own can only make salvation a bare “possibility”. Christ might have died in vain. Being “free” all men might refuse to exercise their supposedly “God-given-freedom”…God’s plan, to call out a people for himself, might never have been realized [it] distorts the doctrine of Scripture itself by finding the ultimate exegetical tool in the subjective experience of human freedom and by denying to Scripture and the Holy Spirit the power, the authority, and necessity of invading the souls of men.” [17]
That is, the transcendental status of logic is only supported in the Christian conception because it is not immanent to the creation but in the transcendent Trinity.[18] It is thus the only possible true transcendental or the only possible basis for the a priori that is not vulnerable to the claim of arbitrariness.
5.3 General Revelation and Special Revelation
The Christian conception is also unique in that right at the beginning of Hebrew scripture, God himself states that He made humanity in “His image.” Though there is a qualitative difference between creature and creator, the apostle Paul reflecting on our status as creatures states we immanently know God through the faculty called conscience but proceed to make the conscious choice to suppress our knowledge of Him. That is, there is a general revelation of God to all humanity, and it is this general revelation through the operations of conscience that makes all accountable to God:
“…for not the hearers of the Law are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness, and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them…” [19] (Emphasis added)
That is, the Christian God does not separate Himself from creation or position Himself above or outside the universe but is intimately involved in maintaining it:
“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities– all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” [20] (Emphasis added)
Truth is thus always available to humanity because reality itself is evidence for God’s providence and common grace.[21] This concept of natural revelation is distinct from natural theology—we are not arguing that nature itself or an intimate knowledge of nature can lead us to a true knowledge of God. Plantinga thus explicates this classical Reformed position:
“[T]his natural knowledge of God is not arrived at by inference or argument (for example the famous theistic proofs of natural theology) but in a much more immediate way. The deliverances of the sensus divinitus are not quick inferences…It is rather that [on] perception…these beliefs just arise within us. They arise in these circumstances; they are not conclusions from them” [22] (Emphasis original).
That is, it is only the special revelation of the scriptures that can bring one to regeneration, but natural revelation can confirm what special revelation teaches.[23] Sin is said to obscure the clarity of revelation, but it cannot expunge it, a person must actively, and thus culpably, suppress the knowledge of God that general revelation brings them.[24] It is this culpable suppression that renders all, regardless of their religious commitment, guilty before God.
5.4 Common Grace, Pluralism and Epistemological Self-Consciousness
The arguments we have presented above were necessarily dealing with Christian philosophy to buttress our transcendental claims regarding our epistemological self-consciousness. However, they have general application to the process of legitimizing philosophizing for in lieu of common grace and general revelation one should indeed expect an energetic if not fierce debate and exchange of views over the details of how one might demonstrate what is “right” or “correct” or is “consistent with science” for components X, Y and Z of its worldview. We would also expect without prejudice or obscurantism historical research and scientific investigations to evaluate historical or scientific claims with theological dimensions, e.g., the Age of the Earth or Creation Science [25] claims, Mohammed’s response to North African Christian apostasy [26] and his early attempt to appear as a prophet to the Jews.[27]
More broadly, then, these specific investigations serve to defuse uncritical religious and cultural pluralism as a coherent option. For example, such discussions might help us to understand Islam, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, as a heretical version of the Judeo-Christian conception of God—a God who is personal and who has given a verbal revelation of Himself. For the Islamic scholar, Deut. 18:18 refers to Muhammed, for the Christian it was fulfilled in Jesus; there is no hermeneutical resolution of these two positions, they are mutually exclusive, they state and believe the data differently.[28] As we have already seen, we encounter the data in a theory-laden fashion and interpret it according to that theory of the world and only an internal transcendental critique will invalidate an incorrect view.
Now we want to immediately qualify this. We recognize, with Kuyper, the concept of “common grace,” the legitimacy of the modal spheres of human life.[29] We are not trying to impose or legitimize a particular religious hegemony. Yet, we are challenging those positions to be epistemologically self-conscious with a view to legitimizing the Christian one as their assumed basis. Some arguments are better than others, there are not just a plurality of “arguments” or “accounts” which are decided on some subjective, preferential basis. That is, just because a worldview (let us say, pluralist option ‘A’) claims to be right about X, Y and Z or can offer an “empirically sufficient” account or justification for a proposition (as in the rival conceptions of Deut. 18:18), it does not mean that the system it claims to represent is coherent unless we accept the principle of induction which we cannot admit as a logical principle unless it be accepted that the same God is guaranteeing the inductive principle. That is, the overall coherence of the system can thus only be established on a transcendental basis. The only conception of a God that does not change and who guarantees the order of nature (allowing us to admit induction amongst other logical constructs), or who makes immutable promises regarding the future, is the Judeo-Christian conception of God.
To illustrate this bold proposition, in a personal conversation I had about Islamic metaphysics, it was put this way to me, “if Allah wills a square to be a circle tomorrow, it would be.” Similarly, that logic explains why in 2015, 2400 zealous pilgrims to the Hajj perished was, according to the Saudis, simply because “Allah willed it” [30] rather than the desperately poor logistical management of the Saudis themselves, reported by those on the ground at the time who survived it. Or the Islamic belief that the prayers of those on Earth could evict someone previously admitted to Paradise or vice versa—someone in ‘hell’ could be promoted to paradise. These admit a principle of “indeterminacy” that is fundamentally contra Judeo-Christian metaphysics and does not align with the Judeo-Christian conception of the nature of God or how He determined history should flow according to prior commitments in the scriptures. This is another reason why we assert that the transcendental for the intelligibility of reality can only be the Christian transcendental.
5.5 Sovereignty, Indeterminacy and Natural Law
However, it must be immediately admitted that the issue of God’s freedom to act, the freedom of His will and the corollary challenge of the freedom of creation, has played a significant role in Christian philosophy and arguably a pivotal role in the formation of the self, and thus the philosophizing self, in Modernity.[31] It is significant that these issues in a secularized context, are still live issues as we discovered when we considered the behaviorist denies freedom of the will in the name of the determinism of human behavior. We are thus limited in our ambition here as to what degree we can do justice to this dilemma, but we can certainly propose an understanding consistent with our overall thesis.
The drift from the teleological synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian concepts to naturalism was a long, slow track in its entirety encompassing many centuries and many different thinkers but in the 25 years from Aquinas to Scotus, there was a major shift. Aquinas was one of the first to grant a realm in which the created, although enveloped by a wider conception of the will and purposes of God, could maintain an operation essentially independent of God, the first strong articulation of a realm of natural law that could be studied in a non-teleological fashion. Then Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308) was one of the first to articulate what was known as Voluntarism that developed the concept of will beyond Aquinas’ expression of it as linked in a constitutive manner with reason and ascribed it a far broader and important role both in God and the creation. For example, “God could create in a human mind a conviction of the presence of an individual entity without that entity being present” (emphasis added) but this was with the qualification “God only acts in with his orderly power, power guided by wisdom.” Scotus, who prefigured Descartes in this respect, then relied on the goodness of God to not deliberately deceive to mitigate a descent into radical skepticism and contingency regarding the real.
However, the potential for epistemological anarchy and ethical skepticism was clearly evident in Scotus, “God was free, for instance, to dispense with or cancel many of the moral precepts commonly believed to belong to the natural law.” [32] Nevertheless, such a radical antinomian position was not in fact actualized until the era of liberal Protestantism many centuries later, perhaps mitigated in the Catholic philosophical succession by an intellectual context that still believed God was essential in some respect to epistemology. Thus, his chronological successor Ockham, less innovative but perhaps more famous[33] emphasized that God was free to the point of non-contradiction, though we will reference a critique of this shortly that tends to obviate its significance as a meaningful limit on divine freedom. He offered a forceful, but by no means a conclusive,[34] criticism of Scotus’ reconciliation of freedom and necessity which concluded at a radical contingency in the will of God for individual entities. This was a radical break from a unity of a teleological account of nature as a whole, but the philosophical implications of such radical contingency offended Ockham’s desire to orthodoxy, and as he could not resolve the tensions, he ended by advocating what Kenny characterized as the “dead end” of devout fideism and a philosophical agnosticism.[35] In other words, he was not prepared to follow the implications of his philosophizing, though he was to set the stage for those who were. Ockham opened the door to a standalone study of nature and others were prepared to go where he was not, where the concept of being was no longer univocal and thus directly dependent on God’s being but merely of individual objects in a relation to His will.
Consequently, it should be of no surprise that in some parts of the Roman Catholic Church history and implicit in some streams of Protestant post-Reformational thought, there was not a problem with the indeterminacy permitted in the Islamic view of reality; some liberal conceptions viewing it as a convergence in thought between the two theisms, indicative of a common root and the same God. I have personally heard a sermon where a Christian minister said that the Christian God could arbitrarily change reality (as Allah above is said to) and whole denominations have practiced “purgatory” [36] where the believers on Earth can make intercession or give gifts that enable the departed to gain entrance into heaven from an intermediate place of waiting (a place of their ‘purging’ considered to be sins that are not punishable by eternal torment). This would also seem to approximate closely to the Islamic view that prayers on Earth can demote from or promote to heaven, especially when ‘naturalized’ to their monetary equivalents on Earth. This was the notorious practice in medieval Christianity but in its original form was not simply a Papist innovation for disreputable money-making purposes. The origin of purgatory specifically stretches to the earliest Millennial doctrine of the early Jewish converts and the early Christians giving it an extremely early date, where it was viewed it as a spiritual discipline of “preparation” or purification for the Second Resurrection at the end of that period. Thus, some caution must be taken where Edwards, a modern liberal scholar, identifies it as a Roman Catholic medieval innovation,[37] what perhaps should be said was that during this period it was elevated to a core doctrine of ‘pastoral’ praxis of travelling clergy in contrast to an ascetic spiritual discipline; in losing that mystical context, it was then consolidated and given a perverted form for those disreputable money-raising purposes. It would thus be a category mistake to take purgatory as evidence of indeterminacy as rationally or theologically justified in the Christian worldview.
Perhaps of greater significance for us in our discussion here where we are arguing as those broadly Augustinian, was that it was also arguably seen in post-Reformational Protestant disputes between Arminians and Calvinists regarding the freedom and status of the will. Calvinists were viewed as emphasizing divine sovereignty which would then minimize a meaningful conception of freedom for creation. However, as mentioned previously, the contribution of Scotus here and the details of the response of his successors such as Ockham is particularly significant for us to frame our interpretation, Kenny goes as far to argue that:
“[M]any of his [Scotus’] philosophical innovations came to be accepted as unquestioned principles by thinkers in later generations who had never read a word of his works…The Reformation debates between Luther and Calvin and their Catholic adversaries took place against a backcloth of fundamentally Scotist assumptions.” [38]
Perhaps the most important of Scotus’ innovations in diffusing our dilemma was his compatibilism where he resolved, in Kenny’s view with lasting effectiveness,[39] that freedom and determinism were not philosophically incompatible. He posed the question thus, “God believes I will sit tomorrow; but it is possible that I will not sit tomorrow; therefore God can be mistaken” but since God cannot be mistaken, the argument seems to show it is not possible for me to do anything other than what God has foreseen I will in fact do. For Scotus, this dilemma was employing the schema, if p and q entail r, then p and possibly q entail possibly r. Scotus resolves the dilemma by demonstrating the schema as faulty, Kenny provides a modernized version of his argument:
“Suppose there are two suitcases A and B, each of which I can carry. But suppose further that I am carrying my suitcase A. In these circumstances, to carry your suitcase B would be to carry A and B, which is beyond my strength. ‘I am carrying A and I am carrying B obviously entails ‘I am carrying A and B’. But ‘I am carrying A’ and ‘I can carry B’ do not between them entail ‘I can carry A and B’” [40]
Thus, Scotus asserts on this basis that human freedom is compatible with divine decrees, they are not the contradictory opposites they would appear to be. He says God foresees future events by being aware of his own intentions and future events are contingent rather than necessary because there was nothing necessary in God’s decrees about the world. If we consider freedom as the opposite of necessity,[41] then the actions within the creation are free. As we noted above, Ockham and many others since have not been fully persuaded but the issue does seem to be migrated into the degree of voluntariness; voluntariness is not a sufficient condition for freedom, yet it is an essential prerequisite, but an action may be voluntary without being free.
Thus, we should now be in the position to appreciate the philosophical significance of the important theological qualification conspicuous in Van Tillian thought that the will remains free but was not autonomous; the influence of Scotus’ compatibilism is clearly seen here, and he wants to address Ockham’s reticence. For Van Til, the will of the individual was free, but not independent from the Creator; human thought was not considered novel but derivative in character. The artist who paints or the musician who plays is only doing so because they are interpreting what God has already placed in Creation and this maintains sufficient basis for God’s foreknowledge. So, even if there is not a radical novelty in their artistic ‘creations,’ their arts are free and voluntary because there was nothing necessary in that creative act, an artist may choose to create a work of art or not to create a work of art but whatever is instantiated would be present in the foreknowledge of God. Van Til is thus sensitive to maintaining both the freedom of God and humanity, whilst maintaining the sovereignty of God. Arminianism, in contrast, was far stronger in asserting the genuine independence of the human will and a realm in which humanity have a being outside of the Creator. Thus, I have heard extreme contingency and indeterminacy argued in Arminian and charismatic circles and the position remains highly influential in evidential apologetics.[42] The criticism of the latter is thus that the question of God is conducted in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, which as we have made repeatedly clear is unacceptable in terms of our thesis.
However, there is a more general hermeneutical circle at work here that should also be considered. Scotus did an admirable work in advancing the discussion, but Ockham got stuck with fideism in trying to follow the argument where it seemed to lead. This is because, when we assert what is possible, this too begs the question:
“It is today more evident than ever before that it is exactly on these most fundamental matters, such as possibility and probability, that there is the greatest difference of opinion between theists and antitheists…Non-believers have false assumptions about their musts.” [43]
In other words, the category of possibility is enveloped by God and not vice versa. I maintain views which assert a radical contingency either in natural processes or as expressions of the omnipotence of God are unbiblical, at best ignorant of what the normative standards of scripture give. The omnipotence of God is not violated by God’s own choice to limit His freedom of action and he frequently in scripture “swears by himself” that we can have confidence in what He says. The paradox of contingency, sovereignty and natural law resolves itself if we admit the premise that the God of the Judeo-Christian view has freely bound himself to His Word with its written commitment to a natural order and He will not break it:
“For when God made the promise to Abraham, since He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, ‘I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply you.’ And thus, having patiently waited, he obtained the promise. For men swear by one greater than themselves, and with them an oath given as confirmation is an end of every dispute. In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, in order that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have strong encouragement, we who have fled for refuge in laying hold of the hope set before us.” Heb. 6:13-18 (NAS) (Emphasis added).
We find further support in a pattern of God “swearing by His own name”:
“‘I solemnly swear by my own name,’ decrees the LORD…” Gen 22:16 (NAS).
“But listen to what the LORD has to say, all you people of Judah who are living in the land of Egypt. The LORD says, ‘I hereby swear by my own great name that none of the people of Judah who are living anywhere in Egypt will ever again invoke my name in their oaths!” Jer 44:26 (NAS).
By “name” we understand that Hebrew idiom was emphasizing something about the fundamental existential nature and ethical character of God. God binds himself in covenant both to creation generally and secondly to his Israel first as a geographical area, later as a multiracial and multinational body known as His ekklesia [44] or ‘church.’ One of the first arrests to the chaos imminent to creation after the figure of the Fall was the covenant of God to maintain order in creation, certain cycles of the Earth were not arbitrary but would be a feature as long as the Earth remained:
“And the LORD smelled the soothing aroma and said to himself, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, even though the inclination of their minds is evil from childhood on. I will never again destroy everything that lives, as I have just done. While the earth continues to exist, planting time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night will not cease…,’” Gen 8:21-22, (NET).
The significance of this passage is that God is not merely limiting his action to the law of contradiction which as Ó Murchadha noted was an “arbitrary stipulation” [45] but as an ethical act of the creator with regards to the creation. Thus, we have no imperative to follow what Louis Dupré had called the collapse in the belief in a rational quality of nature, there remains a logos, the Logos, for us. Whilst we might concur with Ockham that our primary relation is not to be found in the relations of this world but in terms of the will of God, we deny that those relations are unimportant and that the will is inscrutable in its entirety.
In contrast, God created us for His good pleasure [46] but also divided Adam that he might not be alone, i.e., “all one,” that his sufficiency was not to be found in an autonomous self, it is in Adam’s relation to Adam, the male to the female in the world and of the world, that elucidates what Modernity wanted to call the “dark” God.[47] The natural order was to reveal what inscripturation was to interpret properly for us and fulfilled in the “Word becoming flesh.” When Jesus describes himself as “The Truth” it provides us with an anchor, it makes the will of God known and arrests the disordered contingency of the world; one lives not “by bread alone” but “by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” [48] This is a relational, experiential matter with both rational and spiritual dimensions, our work here seeks to validate that union but is focusing on the recovery and exposition of the rational dimension. Jesus as “The Truth,” the Word of God, demonstrates to us the correct use both of scripture and the communion with the Spirit of God, the paraclete [49] that leads us into all truth by bearing witness to the truth.[50] The rational dimension is instantiated in a specific commitment to what we would call metaphysical laws of nature:
“But I, the LORD, make the following promise: I have made a covenant governing the coming of day and night. I have established the fixed laws governing heaven and earth.” Jer. 33:25 (NET).
Thus, in summary, as my rhetorical point, I would rather critically label Voluntaristic Nominalism as Islamic Christianity to make the point that it is closer in its theology to Islam than Christianity; only in Islam is divine freedom unrestrained as a matter of doctrine. In Islam contingency is banished and that banishment is expressed in whatever has happened or will happen is “Allah’s will” with the absurd practical consequences we noted at the end of the previous section. This is without prejudice in acknowledging the prevalence of a similar view across a wide spectrum of Christianity and it being highly influential in both catholic and protestant positions.
Yet finally, my principal objection to an unrestrained divine omnipotence is an ethical one, I do not believe it is a biblically supportable position and that it is a mistaken position borne out of the pressures and tensions with the emergence of Modernity as cogently examined and expertly explicated in the account of Ó Murchadha which we have made reference to in ordering our own thoughts. Part of the service Van Til offered was what Bahnsen called the “Reformation of Christian Apologetics” [51] in arguing for a defense of the faith which rejected both the synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity in Aquinas and the irrationality of voluntarism by a secularization of Ockham in evidentialism. Though Scotus allows us to glimpse a reconciliation of freedom and determinism, the hermeneutical circle prevents any general resolution that would satisfy all objections. Our philosophical point then becomes it is only a Christian conception of Christianity that has any claim as the transcendental of rationality, and it is only by referring to scripture that we can resolve the philosophical tension.
5.6 Biblical Presuppositionalism
As indicated, space will not permit us to argue the details sketched above in any more depth, most certainly because of the theological nature and the range of the rebuttals and replies they warrant, but it does permit us to strengthen our main philosophical point of method. If we are asserting the necessary truth of the Christian worldview, that the Christian worldview provides the foundation for the intelligibility for all propositional claims, then we can see that only by the borrowing from this worldview can the claims advanced by any variant of the contra worldview be understood. A non-believer cannot argue with us until they have accepted, perhaps implicitly and unconsciously, the Judeo-Christian metaphysics with both its determinacy and contingency, logic, the possibility of language and the guarantees of certain knowledge that the Christian metaphysics enables.[52]
That is, the transcendental mode of reasoning, or the more exact synonym indicating Van Til’s particular Christian form of transcendentalism, reasoning by biblical presupposition, is the precondition for intelligibility. The challenge is then to understand correctly how the term “presupposition” is being used by Van Til as failing to recognize the transcendental context merely places Christianity as one competing a priori against any other.[53] Further, a failure to recognize the distinct sense in which Van Til is using the term confuses Van Tillian presuppositionalism with other forms of “presuppositionalism” that were contemporary to his[54] and frequently appear lumped together with him in the literature. For example, the Clarkean use of the term, which viewed presuppositions in an axiomatic or geometric fashion, i.e., not subject to proof,[55] means something entirely different to Van Til’s use of the term presupposition subject to a transcendental proof. Similarly, Schaeffer and Carnell [56] understood “presupposition” as the statement of a scientific hypothesis and let the one with the best correspondence to the court of reality emerge victorious:
“Good philosophers are those who can construct systematically consistent systems of meaning.… This conclusion establishes the possibility of Christianity as an answer to life’s dilemma. Careful investigation of it as a system might establish its actuality…” [57]
“The fact of these data makes the postulation of God’s existence both scientifically and rationally satisfying.… It is likewise good science to declare for faith in the existence of God. The mark of an acceptable hypothesis is its ability to explain the facts as we experience them.… Is it not good science to postulate the existence of God to account for known data in human experience?” [58]
“[T]he Bible claims itself to be a propositional truth.… Therefore it is open to discussion and verification…” [59]
All these examples are radically distinct from Van Til’s sense of the term “presupposition.” The formulations are second-order derivations from what Van Til considers as the presupposition of these presuppositional positions, or the transcendental that makes it possible to support these formulations; or, remembering Kant’s definition, what is assumed for any knowledge. To emphasize, Van Til does consider his presuppositions as subject to an indirect proof from the impossibility of the contrary, i.e., a transcendental proof. For example, in reply to an evidentialist “assault” from apologist Dr Clive Pinnock,[60] Van Til in his rejoinder pinpoints the transcendental, biblical presuppositional nature, i.e., Christian nature, epistemologically self-conscious, logically coherent nature of his position:
“You are quite right in saying of me, “he believes he can begin with God and Christianity without first consulting objective reality.” This is the heart of the matter. If I were to attempt to know what ‘objective reality’ was, apart from the all-embracing message of God as Christ speaking in Scripture, I would deny…all that it means to be a ‘Christian’ …” [61] (Emphasis added).
The glaring mistake Pinnock makes is he assumes “objective reality” is a set of brute facts that are exempt from interpretation or any type of theoretical description, an astonishingly naïve position. It is the mode of reasoning and proof which is at issue here, rather than the nature of the premise.
We recognize the categorical distinctiveness of the transcendental mode of reasoning whilst stipulating only the transcendent ontological Trinity permits a truly transcendental and coherent philosophy to emerge. This was a radical departure from historic apologetic approaches, and we might say, a radical rediscovery of biblical method, most certainly true to the precursors found in the work of the Reformers and specifically in Calvin:
“Mingled vanity and pride appear in this, that when miserable men do seek after God, instead of ascending higher than themselves as they ought to do, they measure him by their own carnal stupidity, and neglecting solid inquiry, fly off to indulge their curiosity in vain speculation. Hence, they do not conceive of him in the character in which he is manifested, but imagine him to be whatever their own rashness has devised…” [62] (Emphasis added).
A recurring theme in Calvin is that a failure to honor the word of God on its own terms, what we are calling a transcendental, presuppositional and epistemologically self-consciousness manner, leads to what the apostle Paul called “philosophy that is vain and deceitful” [63] which should be contrasted with Calvin’s positing of a Christian philosophy:
“…it is the duty of those who have received from God…to guide and assist them in finding the sum of what God has been pleased to teach us in his word. Now, this cannot be better done in writing than by treating in succession of the principal matters which are comprised in Christian philosophy.” [64] (Emphasis added).
Thus, we now have all the parts of our philosophical toolbox ready to be combined into a Transcendental Argument for God. We need to summarize, formalize, and clarify our salient points but we are now in the position to demonstrate the power and application of epistemological self-consciousness.
5.7 Summary and Conclusion
We began this section by identifying that Van Til’s transcendentalism collapses the difference between non-Christian worldviews as simply a difference of emphasis rather than a substantive difference. He made the distinction between competing non-Christian worldviews a dichotomy between religious worldviews that patterned themselves after Christianity, relying to some degree on Christian patterns of thought and irrational or fideist conceptions. We recognized that in Van Til there is a qualitative as well as a quantitative distinction maintained between Creature and Creation; a worldview is considered “univocal” when it refuses to recognize this distinction and exalts human conceptions, or the human intellect as considered able to operate independently from God. To this end, we saw that Van Til recognized the Kantian distinction that a natural theology can only ever establish a naturalized God; in order for there to be a bridge between nature and supernature there must be a transcendent Trinitarian conception for our transcendental that can at once unite mind and world, universal and particular; at once immanent and transcendent. The Holy Spirit unites with the spirit of the individual believer, but God’s autonomy is also protected in the other personalities of the Godhead. We also established the principle that the trinitarian concept allows determinism and contingency to be reconciled in the will of God; God guarantees through His covenant the “Laws of Nature” and indicates His will is that humanity might choose freely.
We recognized that sovereignty, contingency and predestination have been difficult subjects for Christians seeking a coherent account; yet, by considering the scriptural narrative we concluded that predestination and free will are not mutually exclusive in the logic of God. To accept that the natural world operates in a realm of absolute freedom would make both God and scripture subject to the wills of men; rather, the transcendental status and character of logic is derivative from the very nature of God and makes possible the only conception of the a priori that is not vulnerable to the claim of arbitrariness. We noted that the Apostle Paul asserts all humanity immanently know God but decide to suppress the truth because of their unrighteousness and rebellion, they are thus culpable irrespective of their confession or understanding of faith. In this conclusion is the recognition of the distinction between natural revelation and natural theology; the latter untenable but the former universal to all, natural revelation can confirm what the special revelation of scripture teaches, but natural revelation cannot lead to the knowledge of God revealed only by the special revelation of the scriptures.
We confirmed that there is a legitimate place for detailed evidential or scientific research regarding the metaphysical claims that might be found in scripture or to assess the historicity of biblical claims. We understood such investigations can help to diffuse pluralism rather than establish it; we are granting a legitimacy to the modal sphere of human life and are rejecting a religious hegemony, though maintaining the ethical mandate of the Church to ensure research recognizes the transcendental assumptions of its methods as gaining legitimacy and coherency only on the basis of the existence of the Christian God for only that specific conception of God that guarantees determinism in nature whilst maintaining the freedom of individual men. We traced the relations through Aquinas to Scotus who maintained a compatibility between freedom and divine decrees, to Ockham which would give way to a fully independent realm of nature and a fideist commitment; to the Augustinian position in both Reformed and modern Catholicism which maintained that nature and providential grace are not separate. We concluded that Van Til is Augustinian in this very important manner, for he maintained a human will was free but was never autonomous, human thought was not novel but was derivative; we asserted that the category of possibility is enveloped by God and not vice versa, God conditions what is possible. Thus, a discourse that does not recognize this view of possibility invalidates itself for the paradox of contingency, sovereignty and natural law only resolves itself if we admit the premise that the God of the Judeo-Christian view has freely bound himself to His Word.
We thus concluded the necessity of biblical presuppositionalism in establishing that only the Christian worldview, its metaphysical relations, epistemological assertions, and its ethical principles unveiled in the narrative of the scriptures, provides the transcendental foundation for all intelligibility. It is a general condition for the intelligibility of any discourse. We understood that it is important to understand presuppositionalism in Van Til’s sense, there were presuppositionalists that operated on axiomatic or hypothetical assumptions, and which fail to provide a transcendental terminus, dealing only with probabilities, rather than certainties. In contrast, Van Til’s view was characterized as providing the transcendental that makes possible the transcendental principles assumed in science and logic, managing to succeed where Kant failed with his categories of the understanding. With this confidence in the transcendental basis of our method established, we now want to formalize it and then apply it to the central question of our thesis, whether there is an objective proof for the existence of God and the moral imperative for a Christian philosophy.
[1] Rabbinic Judaism is based on the Talmud and not Moses. Although the Talmud claims to be offering a commentary on Moses, it advances doctrines and views that are antithetical to the covenantal religion of Abraham of which Christianity is the fulfilment. It runs into many volumes and is historically the development of the religion of the Pharisees.
[2] Most practitioners familiar with Hindu meditation and transcendental meditation, would consider so-called “New Age” spiritual practices and experiences identical. Many “New Age” groups have as their head a guru as in Hinduism, often from a Hindu nation. Just as Buddhism is considered a localization of a form of Hinduism with the same basic perspective, “New Age” is a Westernized version of Hinduism that might also import a lot of Western psychology and life-coaching to offer an eclectic spirituality.
[3] “Univocal” is used by Van Til in the sense that there is no Creator–creature distinction recognized in the quality (not just the quantity) of the reasoning. Van Til asserted that our reasoning should be analogical in the sense we are reinterpreting experience in terms of the guidance of God’s revelation. As “analogy” is used elsewhere in analytic philosophy with a very different meaning, this led to a frequent misunderstanding of what Van Til meant when he asserted, we reasoned analogously to God.
[4] Van Til, Systematic Theology, 178–182.
[5] As an ethical analogue, Moore called it the naturalistic fallacy to move from what ought to be the case to what is the case.
[6] I would argue this is recognized in Islam but only resolved on a non-rational basis as an issue of faith, see https://planetmacneil.org/blog/applying-the-epistemological-self-consciousness-transcendental-critique-to-islam-hinduism-and-buddhism/.
[7] Deut. 29:29 (NAS).
[8] Butler, Presuppositional Apologetics, objects to this term because modern Judaism is Talmudic rather than Abrahamic and so there is no “Judeo–Christian” tradition. However, there is still an idiomatic use of this term which I would argue makes sense whilst accepting Butler’s criticism of it.
[9] Jer 33:25 (NET); Gen 8:22 (NAS).
[10] Deu 30:19 (NAS). It is of note here that the Greek Septuagint translation of this verse uses the “hina–subjunctive” clause to emphasize the result of the choosing.
[11] This also has an enormous intersection with the “problem of evil” where the presence of evil in the world is defended on the basis of God creating free creatures. This is often seen to mitigate the logical force of the traditional argument from evil where it was viewed as contradictory that an omnipotent God who is also wholly good would permit evil to exist. There is much more to the argument, stated fully by Plantinga, Nature of Necessity, and in a more accessible form in God, Freedom and Evil. Hick, Evil, gives historical coverage of this subject and provides a helpful precis of Plantinga (and other logicians) in the final chapter. Van Inwagen, Christian Faith, edited a volume that indicated none of the fire had gone out of the debate. However, the issue with evil is not so much logical (Plantinga dealt with this in 1974), but psychological, a point also made by Bahnsen. Plantinga has described it as the most difficult of problems facing the Christian theist and contributed an essay ‘O Felix Culpa’ to Inwagen that is undoubtedly an impressive development of his earlier work dealing with the logic, anchored in Calvinism.
[12] τεταγμένοι—verb participle perfect passive nominative masculine plural.
[13] Calvin in his Commentary, loc. 12685 understands this verse differently as referring to the kinds of men, i.e., kings, princes, governors. His commentary is very interesting on this point because he emphasizes the proper relationship of the believers with the authorities (we will consider this in more detail in § 7) as Calvin, like Paul would have also been writing in the context of political tyranny. The French refugees in Geneva had suffered at the hands of those same kings, princes, and rulers. He also had in mind the extreme position of the ‘Radical Reformation’ who had rejected all human authority (e.g., the Anabaptists), providing justification for heavy political action against the Reformers by the monarchs and the Catholics.
There is undoubtedly considerable force to this interpretation and truth in it, but the verse also sits adjacent to an unambiguous generalizing statement (v5) and the continuing argument regarding the salvation of the Gentiles. Consequently, its interpretation is highly disputed and subject to the hermeneutic you bring to the verse and your basic Calvinist or Arminian commitment in theology. It is undoubtedly clear that “election” is taught within the Christian scriptures, e.g., Rom, 9–11, presents a difficult and full argument, as well as within the Hebrew scriptures. However, it is equally clear that the gospel is to be preached to all nations and it is the power of God to the salvation of all who believe. That the gospel is preached is perhaps the most important aspect to root our thinking—Whitfield was a Calvinist who viewed his preaching as finding the elect; Wesley, his partner and associate, was Arminian.
The real challenge for Christian praxis is the so-called “hyper-Calvinism” that asserts people will be saved whether or not they are preached to (for God has individually decided the fate of each person); or which concludes the whole missionary movement is unnecessary because God will save them anyway (as the young William Carey, the founder of the Baptist Missionary Society found out in the 1790s when he was told to “sit down” by his elders for “God will save those men if He chooses to” (my paraphrase)). These are extremely important issues that I can only consider, except for political ethics, outside of this book.
[14] Pro. 20:27 (NAS).
[15] Rom 1:18 (NAS).
[16] Van Til, My Credo, 16.
[17] Van Til, My Credo, 9.
[18] This was also the point of disagreement between the later Dooyeweerd and Van Til (who had been greatly encouraged in his own transcendental critique reading the early Dooyeweerd) captured in the essays and the rejoinder in Geehan (Ed), Jerusalem and Athens, 74–128. This was by far the longest and most detailed response written by Van Til in the volume. Contrast this also with the Islamic view that Allah is not bound to the creation and free to act in any way at any time to affect that creation, i.e., it is antithetical to the conception of a natural law guaranteed by God’s character.
[19] Rom 2:13–15 (NAU).
[20] Col. 1,15–17 (NAU).
[21] This is a major article of Reformed faith and has been particularly controversial in the last two centuries. Van Til, Common Grace, was an extremely important milestone in the debate, it concerns the degree to which the “[the appreciation of] the good and the beautiful that God has given to sinful men [whilst maintaining] the seriousness of sin and the rights of the natural,” (Common Grace, 21). Kuyper’s Common Grace in Science was also considered a major milestone on which Van Til reflects and develops in his own views.
[22] Plantinga, Knowledge, 35.
[23] This is a specifically Reformed, Protestant conception of the relation between special revelation and natural revelation. The RC view is far more amenable to the possibility of a natural theology. Some modern protestant thinkers such as Richard Swinburne also argue for natural theology—Plantinga, Law, credits Swinburne with advancing natural theology further than it has ever been advanced, softening his own, earlier, categorical rejection of natural theology and the “classical” arguments for God’s existence (teleological and cosmological). However, though now acknowledging those arguments as having some value, Plantinga advanced very different arguments, mentioning them only in passing.
[24] As Plantinga notes, this concept is embryonic in Aquinas but explicit in Calvin, which is why he calls his own model the “Extended A/C Model”, Knowledge, 31.
[25] By the “Creation Science” movement we are referring specifically to what might be called “7-day creationism” which is vulnerable to severe criticism as neither properly creationist, scientific or Christian, see Butler, MB107–110 for an in-depth discussion of issues surrounding an important legal case over claims it was a legitimate scientific position. Additionally, strongly connected, but distinct, to the movement is what might be called the Intelligent Design (ID) movement of which Plantinga was frequently conceived of as lending support to because of his critique of naturalistic science.
However, his position is distinctly more nuanced as witnessed in this reply to protagonist Michael Ruse, “Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence “intelligently designed.” The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I’m dubious about that.” See https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/alvin-plantinga-and-intelligent-design and Plantinga, Conflict, 225–64. Plantinga in his “design discourse” cf. “design argument,” employs an argument analogous to that covered previously in this chapter regarding the distinction between natural theology and natural revelation, we perceive design immediately when we see it, we do not reason to it.
[26] It is of considerable historical interest that various protestant groups in Spain lived alongside Moslem settlements in peace because they both rejected the idolatry of the papal church. The genocide directed against the Moor civilization by the Roman Catholic church was equally aimed at the protestant Christians, unfortunately just one such episode in its bloody history.
[27] Certain polyvalent Koranic texts when Mohammed was said to be seeking a unity amongst the theistic faiths belonged to this early period. However, the condition of this conciliation was a recognition of himself as presenting a renewed and unadulterated revelation. When they refused to recognize him, texts were added on which the jihadists base their practice of evangelism by the sword.
[28] Although some might wish to assert the “spirit which animated Jesus now animates Muhammed” (as “Elijah” was equated with John the Baptist by Jesus in Matt. 17:10–13). Similarly, some New Age doctrines abstracted “Christ consciousness” from Christ but also from Christian doctrine. This is because any dogmatic corpus of scripture would have been considered a situational, culturally conditioned manifestation at a particular point in time that certainly has no normative force, i.e., bearing some affinities with postmodern hermeneutics. The essence of this approach is syncretistic and in attempting to honor all faiths, it ends up elevating a pluralistic (and, in our milieu, secular one) replacement ‘faith’ of “tolerance for all” with equal dogmatism, and thus, offensive to all orthodox expressions of faith.
[29] Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty,” 461–490.
[30] Langewiesche, “The 10–Minute Mecca Stampede That Made History.”
[31] This, and the subsequent improvement in the section, again owes a debt to the commentary of Professor Ó Murchadha. The wider issues of the tensions of the philosophical self, faith, reason, and grace with the emergence of modernity are clearly and cogently argued by him in his Modern Self.
[32] Kenny, New History, 324.
[33] “Ockham’s razor” asserts that confronted with two empirically adequate explanations a preference should be given to the one which dispenses with unnecessary entities. It is a powerful principle but Kenny, New History, 326, notes that Ockham’s razor was probably never spoken by Ockham!
[34] It was not “conclusive” in the sense he accepted that Scotus had saved contingency, but this was insufficient to justify God’s foreknowledge of the same contingent events. He offered no account to connect these two.
[35] Kenny, New History, 493.
[36] See Foakes–Jackson, History, 176–7. Although old, this was a “standard” history popular through to the 1960s in evangelical and Pentecostal bible colleges, written at a time just prior to the great battles with Liberalism. The author was a CoE canon as well as a fellow of an Oxford college, despite only having the BD degree, perhaps an interesting reflection on the higher quality of degrees in previous ages.
[37] Edwards, Christianity, 155.
[38] Kenny, New History, 324.
[39] Kenny, New History, 491. In the discussion of Scotus’ compatibilism, I follow his discussion. This is derivative from Scotus’ own discussion found in Lect. 17. 509. However, it is unclear which of Scotus’ works this refers to though he gives a full bibliography of those works.
[40] Kenny, New History, 491.
[41] Kenny, New History, 666.
[42] This has much to do with the conscious return to neo–Thomism within the Reformed community, even Reformed seminaries. In a personal communication with Professor Clary of Colorado Christian University, he indicated he was no longer a Van Tillian presuppositionalist because the Reformed tradition on a proper reading was “Thomist.” However, as Professor Ó Murchadha has pointed out to me, this designation itself needs careful qualification and one “needs to distinguish between Aquinas and a certain kind of [neo-]Thomism.”
[43] These are chained quotes from Van Til in Bahnsen, Apologetic, 281 ff., in the context of a discussion of this issue.
[44] The Greek word ἐκκλησία (“ekklēsia”, Strong’s number: 1577) was originally a term applied to a governmental assembly in Greek city states. The etymology of the word reflects that meaning, the preposition “ek” refers to a moving or calling out of a general body; klesia was a calling, so we have a “calling out” to a governmental vocation. It was an apparently anachronistic use of the term by Jesus (Mat. 16:18), its sense had been greatly weakened to mean little more than an association by that period, but the context makes it clear he was referring to this original sense of the word. Jesus’ resurrection of the word ἀγαπᾷς (“agapaō”) as a more objective and stronger sense of “love” is another example of this renewal of the sense of a word that had almost disappeared from common parlance. It is vividly seen in the closing narrative of John where the difference between phileo and agape is played on with intense dramatical effect in the conversation between Jesus and Peter; Jesus interrogates Peter twice with agape, Peter replies with phileo and in the third instance Jesus uses phileo but then makes clear to Peter the difference between the two. I respectively disagree with the NET translation notes in this respect, who argue that the scholarly consensus of the 20th century is that there is no significance of the variation of the verbs.
[45] Ó Murchadha, Modern Self, 52.
[46] Col. 1, 15–23.
[47] Ó Murchadha, Modern Self, 55.
[48] Mat 4:4; Luk 4:4. This is a quote by Jesus of Deu 8:3.
[49] The Greek word παράκλητος (“paraklētos”, Strong’s number: 3875) has been rendered Comforter, Helper, Teacher, Intercessor, and Advocate in bible versions; the latter three being more forensic and preferred in more modern translations to the first two, which in modern English are much weaker in their sense. The context seems to demand this stronger, forensic sense of the word, especially in Joh 14:26, 15:26.
[50] John 15:26 (NET). As Jesus is “the Truth” so the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (or the truthful Spirit, the Spirit from the realm of the Truth—all possible renderings of the Greek genitive). There is a marvelous theological richness to John’s language in chapters 14–17, which are perhaps some of those most profound and intimate passages within the Christian scriptures.
[51] Bahnsen, “Socrates or Christ,” 191–240.
[52] This is what Van Til labelled as the “unbelieving believer,” one who has persuaded themselves they do not believe and yet they live their life on assumptions only supported outside their worldview. This concept Van Til described as “difficult” owing to the implied paradox, and he struggled to express it clearly. It was left to Bahnsen, Conditional Resolution, to present this concept in a philosophically rigorous manner.
[53] Montgomery, “Once Upon an A Priori,” 380–92. Van Til’s lengthy rejoinder (392–403) was written to correct this misunderstanding, though Montgomery continued to push this interpretation of Van Til throughout his career.
[54] It is an interesting question as to how great Van Til’s influence was on these men. Carnell and Schaeffer had both studied under Van Til, although Schaeffer never acknowledged his influence and Carnell only mentioned Van Til once in a footnote in his own major apologetic work, Apologetics.
[55] Clark, Three Types of Religious Philosophy. Clark was a logical foundationalist early in his career but in this work (his last major work), he finally argues for fideism.
[56] Carnell was the professor of apologetics at Fuller Theological Seminary, one of the great fundamentalist seminaries created by the second wave of fundamentalists in 1947. The story of Fuller is told in Reforming Fundamentalism; these were not as anti-intellectual, obscurantist, or isolationist as had characterized some of the first wave. However, they were certainly not Calvinistic in any respect other than favoring the same linguistic constructions, e.g., inerrancy, scriptural authority etc. (contra Packer’s apology at the end of his Fundamentalism, 173, which had equated it with Reformed Christianity), and they favored rigorously evidentialist apologetics. Carnell recognized the need to engage with conventional intellectual thought which he felt was “existential.” He was thus more than happy to import in some Kierkegaardian conceptions into his thought as well as the post-positivistic emphasis on empirical methods.
[57] Carnell, Apologetics, 97.
[58] Carnell, Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 270 ff.
[59] The expanded version of this material is found in Schaeffer, Three Essential Books, Bk.1, Sec.4.
[60] Pinnock, “The Philosophy of Christian Evidences,” 420–25.
[61] Van Til, Jerusalem and Athens, 426.
[62] Calvin, Institutes, Bk.1, Ch.4, Sec. 1.
[63] Col 2:8, my translation, as also seen for example in the NET translation. The NET translation notes are helpful here, “The Greek reads tēs philosophias kai kenēs apatēs. The two nouns philosophias and kenēs are joined by one article and probably form a hendiadys. Thus, the second noun was taken as modifying the first … ”. That is, the emphasis is on qualifying “philosophy” as of the “vain and deceitful” type, not “philosophy and vain deceit” as rendered by some translations (e.g., KJV, NAS) which would suggest the illegitimacy of philosophy generally (hence, the hostility of many fundamentalists and charismatics to it, with this being the “proof text”). It is true there might be other grammatical constructions that could have been used here that would not have been so ambiguous when translating into English, but this is Greek idiom. The extended second clause of the verse (introduced by the “kata” proposition followed by the accusative case) strongly suggests an amplification of what a “vain and deceitful” philosophy would be, “according to human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” which most translations do unambiguously agree on.
[64] Calvin, in the French preface added to the French version of the Institutes published in Geneva. Calvin had originally published in Latin (which was considered the “international” language of the academy) and then published in French as the influence of the Reformation grew.