Van Til’s Epistemology
The work where one would most expect to find Van Til’s epistemology set forth—A Christian Theory of Knowledge (1954)—is not in fact a standard work of epistemology. Therefore it must be constructed from the body of his work. The label that would seem the most fitting from a Van Tillian perspective would probably be revelational. Certainly Van Til himself would shun the use of “idealist”, as he took the trouble to write, in the following year, another book to persuade his critics that he was not in fact an idealist, that is, Christianity and Idealism (1955).
The idea of revelation stands in contrast to nature for Van Til, just as it did for Barth. Of course there are differences. Whereas for Barth, one could not unveil God in nature “back behind Christ,” for Van Til, one could not unveil God in nature “back behind Scripture.” Now Van Til self-consciously affirmed general revelation, writing that,
“Reformed theology ... holds that man’s mind is derivative. As such it is naturally in contact with God’s revelation. It is surrounded by nothing but revelation. It is itself inherently revelational.”1
Yet when matters turn to apologetic starting points, they had learned to use the term “revelation” in a way that excludes nature.
Here I would divide a summary on Van Til’s epistemology under four heads: 1. The order of being and the order of knowing; 2. Interpreted knowledge versus “brute facts”; 3. “All or nothing,” or, making partial knowledge depend on total truth; and 4. the problem of incommensurability.
The Order of Being and the Order of Knowing
It is the contention of many critics that a major feature of Van Til’s method is a confusion of the order of being with the order of knowing. Most notably the objective priority of God as a precondition (e.g., for knowledge, morality, etc.) frequently translates into the priority of the subject’s knowledge of that priority of God as a presupposition for true knowledge of this or that. A metaphysical priority subtly comes to mean an epistemological priority. This is an error based on a misapplication of a truth. Certainly one may have consequences for the other. Such consequences may even be immediate and logically necessary. However, they are still distinct orders.
Here is one example in Van Til that perfectly summarizes the main way this happens:
“We must rather reason that unless God exists as ultimate, as self-subsistent, we could not even know anything; we could not even reason that God must exist, nor could we even ask a question about God.”2
The classicalist will wholly agree that we ought to discern that God’s existence is a necessary condition for human knowledge in one sense. But what is the problem? We would say that unless God exists, no human reason could; and then we might draw out several lines of reasoning for why this must be the case.
However, Van Til is actually saying more than that God must exist in order for our reason to operate in this realm. He is saying that one must know that God exists in order for our reason to operate here. The first is an insight about metaphysics: God’s existence is the precondition for something else to be. The second is claiming that unless or until an individual sees that metaphysical insight, that he cannot know anything about that same contingent reality.
Another instance can be found in Van Til’s criticism of Hodge's section on the “office of reason,” and specifically the role of the laws of reason to form judgments, including as that comes into play in assessing general revelation. Van Til said:
“Now it is true, of course, that God has planted such laws of belief into our very being ... But the unbeliever does not accept the doctrine of his creation in the image of God. It is therefore impossible to appeal to the intellectual and more nature of men, as men themselves interpret this nature, and say that it must judge of the credibility and evidence of revelation.”3
But to use the laws of thought in assessing the theistic claim does not require prior commitment to the Christian explanation of the faculty doing it. How could it? Was that the case with most people who came to faith? And furthermore, what human being gains early knowledge of counting by first accepting the distinction between odd and even, cardinal and ordinal, and so forth? This is equally absurd in any other area of thinking.
Interpreted Knowledge versus Brute Facts
“God’s description or plan of the fact makes the fact what it is.”4 Further, one’s “own interpretation of nature must therefore be a re-interpretation of what is already fully interpreted by God.”5
This is at the heart of what Van Til means by a revelational epistemology. God is The Interpreter of all that He is, all that He has made, and all that He has spoken. The intellectual duty of human beings is to wholly submit their interpretations to that most authoritative interpretation. And all the Reformed said, Amen.
At the outset the classicalist must insist that there is no disagreement on the question as to whether (a) God is omniscient, (b) God’s word has supreme authority, and (c) in whatever the Bible speaks to, if any lesser interpretation conflicts with the Bible’s interpretation, biblical authority judges that lesser interpretation as false. The reason that proposition (a) is mentioned here—i.e., God is omniscient—is because God therefore “has an interpretation” of all things, which is only to say that He knows all things with perfection.
Now if one is going to avoid the very fabric of idealism in all of this, then one cannot infer from God’s omniscience that everything is an idea of God’s. Certainly the divine mind possesses the totality of knowledge, but this is not the same as to say that these things and God’s ideas are identical. For one thing, that would seem to imply pantheism. Hence, to speak of a totalizing “interpretation” about all things is itself not a totalizing category. All that is true (and thus known by God) and all that may be known about God by finite minds, must forever be two distinct categories.
The issue then must come down to the scope and specificity of Scripture’s interpretation of all things. The Van Tillian treatment of the relationship between interpretation and facts essentially ignores this point.
Not only so, but there is a convergence of our first point about the orders of being and knowing, and then this point about the interpretive system. When it comes to starting points, the Van Tillian considers a unit of knowledge (a fact) to be a springboard for rational autonomy in the classical or evidential approaches. It is something that believer and unbeliever is said to hold in common. It is a fact “in its own right.” Hence the name: brute fact. It is what it is apart from the various dimensions of the subjective.
One critique of such a passive unit of data is that the idea is naive. It is part of what Kant’s form of idealism left behind and which postmodernism eventually took to its logical deconstructing conclusions. Thus a “brute fact” could only be conceived as pressing in upon us apart from any subjectivity. Van Til even said, “The idea of disinterested or neutral knowledge is out of accord with the basic ideas of Christianity.”6 Kierkegaard among all moderns pressed home this subjective dimension of truth. We certainly do not deny that the intellect is active in the process of reasoning about extra-mental objects. What we call an “objective view of truth” does not naively insist that there is not a subjective element in the act of reason. It does insist that the nature of the truth may not be reduced to that subjectivity.
Frame’s analysis of so-called “brute facts,” in his Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (1987) brings much more clarity to how it is being positioned in this debate. There he has Hodge and Schleiermacher juxtaposed to represent an overly objective and overly subjective conception of theology. While Frame aligns his sympathies more with the objective, it is there that he introduces the idea of brute facts. Wherever there is a “bedrock” of truth upon which one builds his system, the interpretation of God has been circumvented.7 This same idea shows up in Frame’s misunderstanding of natural law, namely, that the alleged nature of things is what it is apart from God.
At least Van Til’s description of a “brute fact” comes across as clear and compelling in his book on Common Grace. He says, “The idea of brute, that is utterly uninterpreted, ‘fact’ is the presupposition to the finding of any fact of scientific standing.”8 Here he was critiquing the notion that science can stand on its own in a structureless nature. Such a notion is an a priori philosophy, and Van Til was correct to call the modernist to account.
Where then does this critique of brute facts go wrong in Van Tillianism? It is simply that Van Til does not stop with this observation, from which he could launch a legitimate critique against those modernist presuppositions. Instead he moves from that fact back to his insistence that because this presupposition is a “universal judgment,” that this negates the whole Christian perspective. This is a fair enough point to the evidentialist who is prepared never to address this and leave the unbeliever’s presuppositions unchecked. Note that Van Til is taking issue with any viewpoint for not allowing facts to become facts until the mind of man has made it so. Here it just so happens to be the materialist: “He requires ‘material’ to make facts, but the material he requires must be a raw material.”9
Now we can transfer this to how Van Til understands the classical apologetic method. Take Aquinas for an obvious instance. The Five Ways explicitly announce that they are starting from some observation about the world. In other words, some “fact” is the starting point. The fact is not yet interpreted as the Bible would explain things. A fuller meaning is assigned to it, by means of the demonstration from effects to causes.
All or Nothing: Making Partial Knowledge Depend on Total Truth
This view of God’s interpretation leads one to the necessity of a total system of that interpretive priority. Of course all Christians should have as their goal to “think God’s thoughts after Him,” so to speak. But surely it would be putting the infinite cart before the finite horse to insist too much here. This forces an “all or nothing” epistemology where one must be sufficiently right about those basic presuppositions—e.g., God and Scripture—as a precondition for knowing anything partially true about them. If that is not what the Van Tillian means—that is, if they really would allow a partial knowledge to build up to a fuller knowledge—then it is not clear what remains of their critique of the classical method.
Some statements sound quite biblical, and in keeping with the lesson of the prophet in Isaiah 6, or with the Calvin's opening words in the Institutes. For instance, Van Til says, “we cannot know ourselves in any true sense unless we know God.”10 That sounds both pious and profound. But the modifying word any becomes universally exclusive and therefore unrealistic. The apologist for Van Til will insist, again and again, that this is not “all or nothing,” but is rather restricted to the domain of ultimate issues. Van Til himself fielded the objection
“Do you mean to assert that non-Christians do not discover truth by the methods they employ?’ The reply is that we mean nothing so absurd as that. The implication of the method here advocated is simply that non-Christians are never able and therefore never do employ their own methods consistently.”11
This is another Van Tillian habit: to dismiss their opponent’s objections by settling up the most superficial version of it. Actually our objection concerning what is denied to human beings in general is not that Van Til and his followers flatly “assert” the total invalidation of knowledge, but that, perhaps unintentionally, their principles demand and imply it if they were to be utterly consistent at certain points. But then he returns to his hyperbole (or consistent position): “the ‘natural man’ ... knows nothing as he truly ought to know it ... the ‘natural man’ not only is basically mistaken in his notions about religion and God, but is as basically mistaken in his notions about the atoms and laws of gravitation.”12
The theme has a way of returning with such vivid zeal that the reader is left to wonder whether Van Til was being wildly inconsistent about this or else insincere. To cite another instance, in A Christian Theory of Knowledge, he acknowledge,
“it is, of course, true that many of the sciences do not, like theology proper, concern themselves directly with the question of religion. Granting this, it remains a matter of great significance that ultimately all the facts of the universe are either what they are because of their relation to the system of truth set forth in Scripture or they are not. In every discussion about every fact, therefore, it is the two principles, that of the believer in Scripture and that of the non-Christian, that stand over against one another. Both principles are totalitarian. Both claim all the facts. It is in the light of this point that the relation of the Bible as the infallible Word of God to the ‘facts’ of science and history must finally be understood.”13
At some point, the adherent to this system must admit that their forefather was in fact guilty as charged on this point.
The “all or nothing” conception also begets straw men: “According to the Roman view then, natural man is already in possession of the truth in terms of a true interpretation of natural revelation.”14 Now this “true interpretation” can either mean a sufficiently true interpretation of each individual fact or truth or law, or else a sufficiently true interpretation of the whole field of general revelation. But we must ask: Which does Van Til mean? And then, “sufficient” for what? Or, worse yet, does he really mean “exhaustively true”? I would tend to doubt that. More to the point, features of epistemology such as common notions, the basic reliability of the senses, or the capacity to draw valid inferences—these do not have to constitute a fuller “true interpretation” of the whole of revelation in order to be what they are on the classical view.
What follows from one circle in which each must answer to all is the incommensurability of any unit of meaning in this circle with that in other circles.
The Problem of Incommensurability
Van Tillians are quick to correct anyone who speaks of the denial of common ground. Some statements can be found which seem give an authoritative answer:
“We conclude then that when both parties, the believer and the non-believer, are epistemologically self-conscious and as such engaged in the interpretive enterprise, they cannot be said to have any fact in common. On the other hand, it must be asserted that they have every fact in common. Both deal with the same God and with the same universe created by God. Both are made in the image of God. In short, they have the metaphysical situation in common. Metaphysically, both parties have all things in common, while epistemologically they have nothing in common.”15
Charitably summarizing, then, it is not common ground but apologetically useful common notions to which Van Til objected. Fair enough. However, this does not quite settle the matter.
It is not only the Reformed doctrines of God and Scripture that form the presuppositions of this circle of God’s interpretation. It is also the doctrine of man. When the unregenerate is rejecting the truth, he is doing so, in part, because he rejects what God says about man. The unregenerate proceeds from the position of intellectual autonomy. That is to say, this man believes himself to be what Van Til called “the final reference point of predication.”
“There can be no intelligible reasoning unless those who reason together understand what they mean by their words. In not challenging this basic presupposition with respect to himself as the final reference point in predication, the natural man may accept the 'theistic proofs' as fully valid.”16
Common notions are undone by conflicting doctrines of man. Again, he wrote, “It will be quite impossible then to find a common area of knowledge between believers and unbelievers unless there is agreement between them as to the nature of man himself. But there is no such agreement.”17 How else is the reader supposed to take this but a denial of common notions, or as he says, “common area of knowledge”?
The unbeliever means something wholly different than God does by being and cause and good and so forth. Whatever those older proofs accomplished, the conclusion will not be of the God of the Bible. That conclusion was common among fideists long before the twentieth century. From Tertullian to Pascal to Kierkegaard, the dichotomy between the “god of the philosophers” and “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” was standard fare. What Van Til was insisting drives further down to the roots, past the conclusions to any common premises. For example, he says,
“The Arminian is bound to present the Christian position in atomistic fashion. He will therefore first speak to the nonbeliever about the possibility of supernatural revelation, as though the word “possibility” meant the same thing for the natural man and for the believer. But it does not.”18
No doubt, terms such as "possibility" are indispensable for worldview conversations; but then, if we view things only from the perspective of terms, then not many words or ideas will be spared. And lest anyone think this is out of context or rare, Van Til goes on in the next two pages to do the same with the terms "probability" and "fact."
Van Til wrote “that when both parties, the believer and the non-believer, are epistemologically self-conscious, and as such engaged in the interpretive enterprise, they cannot be said to have any fact in common.”19 To be “epistemologically self-conscious” means, as we might say, to know where things are headed in the conversation. In other words, the unbeliever may indeed admit all sorts of truths that even show up in our Bible. However, the moment that things are consciously related to the religious question, he will reject every unit of truth so related.
We can see how the Reformed doctrine of man would see the moral problem entirely driving the intellectual problem. The unbeliever is really opposed to God at every point. This is a legitimate application of Romans 1:18 as far as it goes. However, even such suppression of the truth requires some shared meaning about those truths for the suppression to take place.
Putting together our points about interpreted knowledge and incommensurability, this necessity to interpret facts only from within the system demands that each person properly relate any other relevant doctrine to the fact in question: “One who seeks to make intelligent predication about being in general allows in effect that one who does not make the Creator-creation distinction basic in his thought can yet make true assertions about reality.”20
Here is the idealist element that Van Til was very keen to deny. In an unguarded moment of wanting to make his point he wrote,
“Without the presupposition of the truth of Christian theism no fact can be distinguished from any other fact. To say this is but to apply the method of idealist logicians in a way that these idealist logicians, because of their own anti-Christian-theistic assumptions, cannot apply it.”21
It is important to understand that while Van Til is distancing himself from idealists in one sense, showing what his “revelational” Christian theism can do that their Idealist version cannot, yet in order to do so, he takes the very same position as these so-called “idealist logicians,” that is, making each fact square with every other fact: “Without such a system of truth there would be no distinguishable difference between one particular and another.”22
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1. The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2008), 113.
2. Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2007), 179.
3. Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 103.
4. Common Grace and the Gospel (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2015), 9.
5. “Nature and Scripture,” in N. B. Stonehouse & Paul Wooley, ed., The Infallible Word: A Symposium by the Members of the Faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2003), 278.
6. Christian Apologetics, 40.
7. John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1987), 77-78.
8. Common Grace and the Gospel, 8.
9. Common Grace and the Gospel, 8.
10. The Defense of the Faith, 101.
11. Christian Apologetics, 132.
12. Introduction to Systematic Theology, 64.
13. A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1975), 37.
14. The Defense of the Faith, 110.
15. Common Grace and the Gospel, 9.
16. The Defense of the Faith, 110.
17. The Defense of the Faith, 91.
18. The Defense of the Faith, 164.
19. Quoted by Kurt Jaros, “Faith and the Natural Light of Reason: How Van Tillian Anthropology Fails,” in David Haines, ed., Without Excuse (Leesburg, VA: Davenant Press, 2020), 36.
20. Christian Apologetics, 38.
21. The Defense of the Faith, 137.
22. The Defense of the Faith, 137.
