Introduction to the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til

[Music] welcome to christ the center your weekly conversation of reformed theology my name is camden busey we're now on episode number 656 i'm here in grace lake illinois and i'm delighted to be back with everybody and particularly with our good friends we have first i'll introduce dr lane tipton who serves as a fellow of biblical and systematic theology here as well as and more significantly a pastor of trinity opc in easton pennsylvania welcome back lanes good to see you oh as always it's great to be here camden and we also have with us jeff waddington who's pastor of faith opc in fawn grove pennsylvania welcome back jeff good to see you too oh it's good to be here brother yeah well we've got a big uh episode lined up uh you know sometimes as a podcast host you kind of you think like you're going to be able to uh to surprise people but by the time they're listening or watching to this they've already seen the title and description of what we're talking about so there's really no way to uh to surprise people unless they're just listening blindly on an automatic playlist of some sort but today we're going to be talking about the theology and apologetics of cornelius van till one of our favorite theologians uh someone we are greatly in debt to here at reformed forum and very thankful for his work in uh in reformed apologetics specifically but his particular approach to apologetics is merely an application of uh confessional reformed theology to that particular discipline and therefore his is approach to theology could be used in a variety of different uh departments and it has been uh but we've got big news and um this whole episode is going to uh focus on on walking through material that lane recently addressed in a new course that we have online at reformed academy i've been mentioning it in episodes past but if you head on over to reformedforum.org you'll notice that there is a new tab at the top of the page where you can click academy and there you can browse courses you can follow along and you can check in on your progress for how you're doing in those courses and pick up where you left off and uh with this course an introduction to the theology and apologetics of cornelius van till we now have four courses uh available we have my chorus introduction to covenant theology jim's chorus introduction to the westminster uh shorter catechism questions 1 through 38 and then lane's course foundations of covenant theology which is the seminar that he taught in wimberley texas last year so we're trying to build out the curriculum and uh really excited about the way it's coming along and with this intro course we have eight major sections totaling over five hours of instruction i think when i broke it all down by individual video segments we have i believe 43 videos ranging from you know five minutes to 12 minutes on average in that ballpark and uh it's just a wonderful wonderful series we're going to talk about that today walk through the different sections and aspects of the theology but before we do that i also want to mention that this is just the beginning of courses on van till and of course on everything that we want to uh to produce and distribute through reformed academy our faculty has about a list of 40 classes that we're that we've sketched out and working on preparing and scheduling and filming uh here in the studio and then putting out online for free as as as much as possible and uh of course this van tilt course is free but it's only the first of a scheduled eight courses so what you'll find is that the in in the lectures lecture one is kind of an overall introduction to everything but then lectures main sections two through eight which again are about four plus hours of material are serve as introductions to what we hope will eventually become an entire course in its own right so we'll break that down and uh talk about it today and i'm excited to do so but first i gotta mention at least a reminder of where we uh where we met now jeff you and i met uh online kind of through some odd circuitous means uh through an old website called solagratia.org that i was running uh with a friend of mine and then you started writing for it and then uh we became uh friends kind of you're my i always joke you're my first internet friend and then i remember back in uh after we'd been talking for a couple years on and off on the phone and through email i came out to westminster in philadelphia to find an apartment because i was planning to matriculate in person uh in the summer of uh 2007. so jeff do you remember that you remember coming to pick me up in your van at the montgomery library after hours i do remember that and then taking you over to to lane's front porch right yep exactly where lane still lives uh today and uh yeah you're like we're gonna go over for this uh for this meeting do you remember what it was a meeting of this is an interrogation dawson caves right yes the dawson k society can you you were involved with that much you know earlier than i was because this was my first introduction to it what can you explain that because it said yeah it was a student formed and led a discussion group dos being the nickname for machine because uh machine is the german word for girl or maiden right and the dos would would simply be the the definite article and then k's is the nickname for uh dr van till i guess k's is a is a nickname for cornelius yeah it's like a common name the nicknames from and van till and so was an apologetics a westminster an apologetics orientation student formed and led discussion group and the the the so the students who attended uh there was one gentleman who who led the group who was i guess basically behind it and i forget his name now i can i can see him in my mind well there have been several over the years yes um so it changed matt williams was running it for a while and nate shannon uh was running it for a little while and it was matt who i remember he had red hair and beard yep yeah okay so it was a good it was a good discussion group sometimes more vigorous than at other times and so that's what we that's what i took you to on on lane's front porch and as you know we've had many such front porch visits over the years with yeah with lane yeah i was just an enterprising you know young student had i had taken some distance courses but i hadn't done anything on campus yet i hadn't taken uh much in by way of any introduction to machine or van till but i've been reading van till quite a bit on my own and so i was just ecstatic that we were going to go talk about van till and uh delighted to you know to be able to interact with people face to face on the subject matter because it's not something you can find people to talk about with very often and so uh that that was kind of the beginning of it uh where i met you in person was the same day and then you took me uh right away to go meet lane on his porch and and we we have had many many conversations on that porch since then and uh really just trying to continue on that that tradition of um of theological and philosophical interaction uh ideally in service of the church and so that's what we're trying to continue here with this new curriculum and and specifically with this first course this introduction to the theology and apologetics of cornelius fantille uh elaine why don't you explain you do it in the class but uh let us know a little bit about this class and about your introduction to van till i think that will serve us well as we start to get into the material yeah it's a labor of love for me to do it um when i was converted back in 1987 um one of the first things i did was call david brack uh who was doing young life in amarillo at the time and i would attend young life meetings off and on when i was in high school but i had absolutely no interest in christ it was a purely social thing but i always listened to him and he always had a lot of really good things to say so i called him as soon as i was converted and after he had given me sprole and packer and berkoff and a few other theologians i kept asking for more i told him how much i appreciate it gave me warfield um it wound up giving me uh both vos and van till but in order it was van till first and then vos and i began to read van till and early on i would say that in the movement of my conviction set i became convinced very very quickly of calvinism and covenant theology plato baptism flows right out of that and then i started to understand the depth of van till's penetration on topics of trinity and covenant his transcendental or presuppositional apologetical approach and um and and during that time also became aware of the work of greg bonson and began studying under bonson at the time as soon as i heard that he was offering courses and was an expositor event till this was all well before i went to westminster california in 1994 and studied out there under klein and strimple frame was there and others clowning and so um you know van till has been someone that as early as late 87 i'd say early 88 uh i threw mr lee at westminster discount book service um i bought all of the things that he had after i read uh what brat gave me which was christian apologetics and defense of the faith i i combed all of the places i could find to get the resources from van till and through mr lee uh at westminster discount book service i published the intro to systematic theology the survey of christian epistemology uh common grace in the gospel and so this this has been almost coming of of a full circle to come back and finally do a a course that introduces his theology and apologetics and tries tries to capture something of the grand scope and depth of his theological and apologetical enterprise so this this course was a particular delight for me it really was oh i i wish i had this when i when i was started when i think back to when i got into it i got into van till to begin with uh through a recommendation there's a friend of mine an associate pastor at the church i was attending who was a a student a phd student at ted's so he'd drive three this was in peoria illinois so he'd drive three hours to get up to deerfield illinois to go to trinity evangelical divinity school and he wanted to uh he had received some vantal instruction at the master seminary because they had an apologetics professor there who was influenced by van tilt mantle excuse me and so um he wanted to kind of bone up on it uh in preparation of his of his phd studies so he said hey camden why don't we read this book together because i i would meet with him every week just as kind of a young man you know he was kind of discipling me but i could tell he kind of wanted to redeem his time you know so he's discipling me but he's also getting something done to benefit him which is fine it's great if you can double up that way and i was all for it he said let's read uh this book and he sent me a link to van till's apologetic by greg bonson which is for you know sadly out of print now we find out we hope yes we hope some folks from p r publishing are listening because we would like to sell a lot more copies of that uh with students that sign up for this free online course and um and uh you know so if they could print another round of those i think uh i think we could do some work to traffic them um anyway so that's that's uh you know i read that book which is a combination of of selections of van till's work from many of his different books so it collates them all in topically and then bonson would include his own commentary introduction and interaction with the material so it's it's quite useful and uh that was published in 98 i have no idea what life would have been like in 87 uh incidentally in god's providence that's the year van till died the year that you were converted to the lord so um you came to van till right after uh no doubt he passed away may i please meet this man and he told me he said lane you're not going to believe this but the summer that that that you were converted vantill had just passed away and i was i was so sad i really wanted to talk to him someday yeah that is that is uh i wish i could meet him too but uh you know i was seven you know i was concerned with uh not even baseball yet so anyway long time ago so there there weren't a lot of introductory materials when it started to get in more deeply and you know you read vantil directly you know i'd try to read all of the secondary literature that i possibly could on it stuff that's got elephant wrote so stuff uh i think of um tom notaro's van till on the use of evidence i i've relayed my story about that i read i read that book in wrigley field during a rain delay um and the instant i finished it they said play ball it was it was glorious and then um oh uh bonson had you know the great debate with gordon stein i'd listen to that i found that online and then also a series like an introductory series where he taught he gave like four or five lectures to college students i don't even know where that was do you know what that is guys uh it was a vid a dvd series i think i got from american vision uh or their covenant media foundation one of those thereabouts and uh and watched his his lecture series in which he was walking through uh several basics of uh reformed apologetics in the tradition of van till so but other than that there really isn't any comprehensive um course uh that would deal specifically with cornelius van till until unless you went to westminster theological seminary but even even there there sometimes the emphases are of a you know because it's a seminary course it's not necessarily going to provide the same kind of introduction or even necessarily emphasize the same kinds of things that that this course does and so this course i believe it's while it's well it's um substantial and uh certainly every single van tillian would be and you know just reformed theologian no matter if you're a phd or you're just new to it they certainly benefit from it we've been sending it to a lot of folks uh bill dennison danny olinger alan strange you name it there's many people that are just delighted to have these resources and these people know van till very very well yet are benefiting greatly nevertheless we're starting from the building blocks but going very deep and thorough and lane i think you just really nailed it with this class and providing an introduction like this there's just there really is nothing out there quite like it it's unparalleled in that sense now before lane before you respond that lecture series presented to students camden that greg bonson did sounds like it might be the basis of this new book which is against all opposition yeah it's kind of a very basic it's not it doesn't go into a lot of detail uh but it's a good intro i mean a good first book but anyway so that's interesting because it dates back to the mid 80s the original talks anyways there you go i think he was referencing terminator 2 and the one i watched so that would have been early 90s but i'm sure he had done many and had been invited to various it might have even been at uc irvine or through a campus ministry or something like that yeah he did that frequently so but anyway that's based on a series he did in the mid-80s yeah just a side note on the van till's apologetic which i pray comes back into print it's an invaluable resource um when it came out i was thrilled because when i read it it was a survey of everything i'd learned from bonson in the advanced apologetics courses i'd taken with him and the only main difference was that he had uh put in to those lectures large swatches of primary sources from ventile's corpus and then the coursework that he had done explicating van till was kind of interspersed with it and so it was a wonderful review of really what monson gave you ranging from the intro to a few advanced courses on apologetics and i've just got to say i found them so useful there's there's so much more to say and we do that in this course we advance beyond what bonson had said but just such a wonderful foundational resource i hope it comes back into print yeah yeah now that would be delightful as i understand having conversation with folks at pnr their stock has sold off and they don't even it's because it predates the pdf step in the in the printing process so they don't even have a pdf uh of the of the yeah there's some technical challenges but um well you know if they'd we'll try to work on it get them to do it if they won't do it try to maybe they can give it to us volunteers to uh to work on that we can get it type set and printed it up print it up again who knows uh it needs to exist now uh there are a lot of uh van tills writings that are somewhat difficult to come by we've got a special kind of episode of reform media review where we review a lot of these original copies with ryan noah so i hope to produce that get that edited and get it on the website sooner rather than later but for prospective students who want to take the course and maybe are having difficulty finding the books you can find them on the used market but you can also get the works of van till through logos so years ago i think it was eric sigward who i do not know who put together kind of a van till digital library on a cd-rom you know for you young ones uh you know you used to get software and resources on cds compact discs which you still may see around today but um um before that oh old timers three and a half floppies five and a quarter floppies before that um [Music] probably won't even load in your computer but uh point being you can get the digital resources through logos though the entire van till collection right there which is which is tremendously handy so things are a little bit more accessible if you have some some money um and they're not it's not too cost prohibitive to get that library but if you don't have it um you know finding used books but the event the vantel reader by botson is is a real quick easy way for 30 bucks or so to just get a large swath of what you need but yeah let's talk a bit about um some of the materials and the in the in the course and particularly the necessity of this class and some people may say well why why spend so much time on cornelius van till are you guys you know exalting this man to be you know some sort of saint is this some um you know form of hey geography uh the the why why does reform forum care so much about vos and van till it's weird it's uh quirky uh well sure it can be weird and quirky but that doesn't bother me i hope it doesn't bother youtube brothers no but not at all we love these uh two theologians so much because they are they are excellent expressions of a of a type of theologizing of an approach to the scripture that we believe is most faithful to what the bible tells us about itself and so when we're looking at how god has revealed himself through the things that have been made and also through his word specifically we also realize how he revealed himself progressively through the ages now he interacts with his people mediated through covenants to bring his chosen people into a more glorious exalted life with him in heavenly places and vos and van till are more contemporary ish examples of theologians who understood that and uh devoted their life to expressing that very idea so when we're following after and trying to build upon the work of vos and van till it's not out of blind devotion to these men uh we hope it's not and we don't ever want it to be but it's out of uh following in their model in their mold uh in their path and uh and really learning from and and seeking their leadership so to speak through through their writings and through their example and so vos group is is a means by which we promote that legacy and van till uh an excellent student of vos vos was his most influential teacher is certainly is is an excellent model of how a vossen type of theology and biblical theology may be applied to the discipline of apologetics or defending the faith but really we see with van till that he's not merely a narrow-minded apologist but a theologian seeking to express um the very nature of the immutable self-contained trinity and how that triune god relates to all of creation and is in fact the foundation of and the sustainer of all of that creation but brothers why it's van till's under attack uh he always has been ever since he started writing but in many ways we see a resurgence of this attack either from uh people outside the tradition entirely especially with people that would criticize van till's uh reading of uh thomas aquinas but we see it even from within our own uh denominations you know the circles of day park we have uh folks like um richard muller we have john fesco keith mathison other people that are attacking van till and and trying to demonstrate how he is an incompetent theologian others who reject his uh approach to natural theology whether they understand it is another question there's a forthcoming book from the davenint institute i was just made aware of that's going to be addressing i think with 13 different chapters all of vantill's failures and natural theology so you know we're dealing with a context a polemical context in which uh van till's kind of being uh dug up from the grave and and uh trying to kick him you know but at the same time we see that his theology and what he actually taught is still as applicable as important and as necessary today as it was back in the 50s and 60s vantille was largely writing in a polemical context against absolute idealist and against a neo-orthodoxy but the errors of those theologies are are just you know multiplying today they maybe are multiplying in different forms but brothers i mean do you agree i mean i'm i'm seeing evangelical appropriations of all the things that van tilt was trying to fight against well certainly you have some of the negative assessment of until is is is attributed to misunderstanding some of it is i suppose bad will some of it is the result of of students of van till who have not uh followed in his track uh as they ought to uh but certainly van till has been iconoclastic in terms of the history of apologetics he's also he's applying uh standard what i'd call standard dutch dutch reform continental reform also westminsterian reform theology to the discipline of of apologetics and one of the benefits of say having bob ink in english now is that you read him and you go wow he sounds like van till well what we what we realize is actually van till is sounding bavinkian uh or vos and boss is doug master boss yeah i mean the same thing right you so you realize that that that van till is is is synthesizing he's bringing he's or he's weaving a tapestry from strands that are that that have been uh understood and appreciated within the reform uh tradition and he's taking it and applying it to an area that and showing demonstrating that that apologetics has often been done uh in a hodgepodge um over too eclectic a manner not consistent with the theology it's seeking to defend apologetics is often approached as some sort of arbitrary decision that you make after your theology is done you know you have a you have a method of you say well we've said all these things about theology but then the reformed person who believes that god is the creator and sustainer of all things god is omniscient omnipotent and but yet at the same time we're all of a sudden going to decide that practically speaking man just operates on his own and we're going to uh you know give evidences uh neutral facts to to unbelievers who are dead in their sins and uh incapable of thinking correctly about about matters and we're going to allow them to ascertain the truthfulness of scripture based on these evidences we give them now i know it's very simplistic and and simplified but those are some of the matters that are at stake but it all starts for van till with the very doctrine of god which is why i love the fact that vos's reformed dogmatics are available but also bob ink and there's been such a resurgence in bobbing studies we see the trinitarian approach and the the the commitment to classical theism you know the classical forms of of uh immutability and the divine attributes we see vos and bovink having a commitment to those but van tilt as well now van tilt did speak uh in in at times in an innovative way in order to protect what i believe is a classical form of theism but lane could you explain how how the trinity and the self-contained triune god is so essential to van till if we get that wrong you can't understand anything he's talking about sure let me put it let me build on the previous conversation as well incorporate that in i think what a lot of ventile's critics are concerned about is some of ventile's disciples have gone the way of theological mutualism ascribe change to god claim that when god relates to the world he needs intermediate neither divine or human properties that relate him to the world and that makes it appear that van tilt himself might be heterodox but if you look back at what van till is doing following vos and um the reformed tradition ventil one of his chief critiques of bard is bart is not calcidonian bart is not fundamentally full-blooded creedal he he has rejected the theology of the ecumenical creeds and intermingled god and man and that and van till's critique of many other theologians and philosophers is that they're not fully reformed they're not calvinistic they're not following the confessional standards uh of the church and so ventil's starting point as someone committed to the theology of the scriptures is that he is deeply creedal robustly confessional and he's not an evangelical biblicist trying to do his theology in the corner aiming for innovation he's taking the resources of the scriptures in their creedal and confessional expressions and he's seeking to apply them in an orthodox way in constructive context he's he's interacting with idealism he's interacting with bard he's interacting with roman catholicism and and he's fundamentally orthodox yet deeply constructive as a theologian now um a lot of his critics i think for reasons due to biblicistic and evangelical uh misappropriations of ventile might by even by those who might uh want to claim the name ventilian i think that's put a really bad taste in the mouths of some of his critics but if you go back to his doctrine of the trinity for instance which you asked about camden one of the things that van tilt makes so explicit is that if you deny that god remains self-contained immutable and impassable in his relation to creation if you deny that point ventil says you have committed perhaps the chief theological sin of correlativism that is making god and the creature mutually participant in a common event of becoming a common vortex of change and transitions and intellectual and emotional growth that applies to god and man in this new relation of mutual becoming participation in time and change and chance van till seeking to be calcidonian will not allow for any kind of mutual participation either of the creature in god or god in the creature and in that way and this is exemplified especially as critique of bart in that way van till is stunningly calcidonian and he's thorough going in his theology of god as simple absolute and immutable not simply apart from but even more intensively in his relation to creation and in his special act of providential voluntary condescension which we call covenant so that the god of the covenant is an absolute immutable impassable self-contained god in the final reference point of all human predication and the one who in his revelation therefore speaks with absolute authority i think if if critics of van til would recognize the depth of that insight the deeply catholic and reformed character of his reformed biblical and systematic theology i think they would go from being critics to being deeply appreciative of someone who not only held the line of orthodoxy but constructively advanced it over against the inroads of deviant roman catholic theology deviant neo-orthodox theology deviant absolute idealism and other forms of idealism and uh this course is designed in part to capture that ventile who has been forgotten due to a constellation of reasons i think yeah well let's parse this out a little to speak about two very basic examples you mentioned theological mutualism but then you also mentioned you know evangelical approaches we could fit in there modernist approaches because that's where some of the evangelical approaches are moving and van till was uh one of the earliest english writing critics on on bart and uh the form of new modern new modernism but then the roman catholic side of things so when we're talking about the god world relationship van till uh purportedly would come in every single lecture and he would draw the same lesson the same diagram on the chalkboard it's two circles a larger circle and a smaller circle those are connected by lines and the larger circle was supposed to represent the self-contained triune god the absolute god independent immutable impassable everything that we want to say according to classical theism and particularly reformed confessional theism he did not want to nor did he deviate from that and we can talk about his trinitarian theology when when we get there and you can also watch the lectures on that if you would like to criticize but the point is that there's the creator there's the creature and we can't blend the two the lines that represent the connection are meant to indicate the voluntary condescension on god's part which we express by way of covenant that's how god has told us he relates to us but in that relation there is never a blending or emerging of the two and that's where so many approaches go wrong because they introduce a third thing lane can you explain what that third thing is for let's maybe start with bart first and then we see how that works itself out in evangelical theology of late where people are a little bit fascinated with some of those things but then also the roman catholic version yeah um with us when you're thinking about the creator creature distinction bart affirms the absolute ontological distinction between the creator and the creature but where bart goes so wrong is when god relates to the creature he relates by virtue of a third thing that he calls god's time for us god takes time to himself in the event of jesus christ so that both god and man in jesus christ are in a mutual process of becoming god for us and god with us there's a mutualizing of divine and human participation in time so that god is not in relation to the creature absolute self-contained simple impassable he is rather a participant in the becoming that we ascribe to the creature mutually appropriated to god in this event of god's becoming jesus christ the christ event and um both van till and bovink say that there is no intermediate category between the creator and the creature in which the two participate and by which they are related not time if it's barred uh not being if it's roman catholic theology not historical contingency if it's evangelical mutualism rather god as the self-contained triune god relates to man as dependent and created and contingent and he does not need any third thing in order to relate he relates sovereignly freely from himself so that god as god self-contained and absolute relates to man as man image bearer in covenant without either man participating in god's being or god participating in man's becoming and that is if you want something rock bottom for the theology of ventil you have to say this what he affirms in the creator creature distinction he continues to affirm at every point in the creator creature relation and that sets him off over against neo-orthodoxy on the one side roman catholicism on the on the other side because in in neo-orthodoxy god and man participate in this third time and in roman catholicism man through grace begins to participate in the interior essence and processions of the godhead and van till is saying a robust no to both and in that way he's maintaining something not only true of classical theism but he's maintaining something fundamentally true of reformed anthropology and covenant and um and and i think if as as we continue to expound van til and understand him against the backdrop of his robust commitment to augustine calvin vos bovinck the hodges and others i think you start to get a very different view of ventile than van till some kind of let's just say some kind of evangelical biblicistic mutualist he's actually the very antithesis of those things and the course is designed in part to help people get an orientation event until to see some of these things yeah idealism is another one that gets thrown in there i guess that's the last lecture here in the in the course last section so we have eight major sections the eighth major section is on idealism uh although the there are 43 i believe uh video segments here but idealism is one that's thrown out there so often because vantilla will use terms like concrete universal and other phrases that were typically used by uh idealists either absolute idealist or uh you know of the british variety but there are also americans there's also germans we've got hegel we've got kant you name it van till was thoroughly uh aware of various forms of idealism and sought to criticize them and and really to destroy uh that theology as it posed a danger to the church even in his doctoral dissertation and he never stopped doing it throughout all of his works but nevertheless at least as early as the 1950s in 1953 with the calvin forum there were several articles by jesse deboer cliff orla bake and others who were claiming that van till was an idealist look at the terms he uses he's just he's an idealist and now we're seeing a resurrection of this with the criticisms from fesco and and others uh who are presently um you know resurrecting criticism from 70 years ago so how did van till relate to idealism what was his intent and not just his intent but what what do his writings demonstrate about his awareness of idealism and his fundamental critique of it well that's something we deal with in the course both in the intro and the first lecture and then in the final lecture and let me just put it this way the hallmark of uh idealism the absolute idealism that van till was interacting with is that the absolute needs the particulars of the changing space-time world to achieve full self-consciousness to come to full actualization uh put it this way bart actualizes the mutuality of god and man at the alpha point in the christ event that's where god and time god and man come together in this third time and both are mutually becoming in the christ event for the absolute idealist there is an incremental movement by which the absolute comes toward full self-actualization comes toward full self-consciousness of both self and the world through a process of interaction with space-time particular particularity moving toward what hegel called a concrete universal where there's nothing in the universal not expressed in the particulars there's nothing in the particulars not contained in the universal and and the point of absolute idealism is that the absolute becomes absolute only at the omega point of an historical process van till pace bart and pace the idealist but now we're talking about idealism van tilt says no no no if you're looking for a concrete universal a fully self-conscious self-contained self-complete entity do not think of an historical process moving toward an omega point and yielding a concrete universal rather think of god himself as self-contained self-complete immutable impassable and simple in all of his relation to creation from its alpha to its omega that god remains self-contained at every point along the line there is no becoming there is no development there is no unactualized potential in god and so van til's critique of absolute idealism we could talk about kant if we decide to is that it reduces to pragmatism to the idea that space and time and change and chance are fundamental to the identity of the developing absolute and so uh van till's brilliant critique of idealism and by the way if you don't understand his doctoral dissertation and his critique of idealism you're going to miss the rest of his theology and his critique of of post-enlightenment theology and philosophy in particular his critique is that that absolute idealism is no better than pragmatism why because it cannot affirm at any point the self-contained self-complete triune personal god and so in this in this lecture series we we try to feature that and say that when van till uses the language of the concrete universal it's analogous to john using the logos theology using the logos language in john 1 and saying the logos is not an imminent principle of rationality but the self-contained person of the trinity that second person to trinity eternally begotten of the father and as such immutable impassable and self-contained um so van till's language of of concrete universal far from being a concession to idealism is the strongest conceivable critique of idealism because he's saying that what the idealists are after a concrete universal cannot be found through a historical process that yields a concrete universal you have to begin with the one uh and in whom unity and diversity are equally ultimate and equally immutable from all eternity yeah and there's a great difference with the kantian form as well because uh the idealist would say in the kantian variety that there are merely phenomena out there but it's it's the mind of the critical subject that imposes categories upon the phenomena in order to make sense of them so in effect reality exists in the mind of each critical subject and van till is saying the exact opposite of that because he would say that reality exists in the mind and according to the knowledge of god and according to his sovereign power alone and that all subjects all human beings think god's thoughts after him yet on a created level analogously we don't have a strict identity with god but that doesn't make our knowledge false either these are some just very basic categories very basic theological constructs that van till uses which are mere applications of just very basic uh uh dictums dicta of classical theism yes god is omniscient we are not god creates and sustains we don't we don't become god god remains transcendent yet he truly relates to us vantals is working these basic points out in polemics and in defending the truth in the face of a variety of errors uh forms of idealism being won and uh you know there are many others that he addresses neo-orthodoxy etc one final thing just on concrete universal sometimes people have difficulty thinking about terms like that think of the the uh alternative term an abstract universal you know there are many who would say that god doesn't exist he's just a mere idea something that we make up you know a god of the gaps of sorts or some some power that's out there that you know we can we we can't make sense of the world so we have to have some sort of universal explanation that kind of totalizes everything a unified theory of everything you know in the form of a deity and van till saying no a god is the universal but he's also concrete as there are those who would say that things that are real can only be particular and he's saying no we have a concrete universal so even there he's doing in some ways a play on words uh appropriating a term from idealism but using that term to demonstrate number one the the failures of idealism on its own terms but number two the the wonderful truth of god's uh scriptures as they've been given to us that's what vantill is all about and in fact in common grace in the gospel to make here that same point camden i think this is right on point van till says that for a christian philosophy of history the moment in terms of its the interface of laws and facts and the lockstep transitions that move in time that the significance of the moment is exhausted by the being plan and knowledge of the immutable triune god and so it is this god who gives the moment its significance and is in no way conditioned by the moment but is the all-conditioning one who renders the moment what it is and gives it its significance and that is the polar far side of what the idealists were saying about the nature of history in relation to the absolute so it's a it's an absolute con pun is intended here an absolute contrast that van till's drawing with the absolute idealist tradition and the same with khan he's saying that god not the human mind is the source for all intelligibility etc um and it it really it really is just van tyl's dependence on the scriptures as understood in the creeds and confessions of the church and really epitomized in the biblical and systematic theology of his favorite professor vos take his reform dogmatics take his biblical theology take the pauline eschatology take the self-disclosure take the kingdom of god in the church take all that vos taught van till as being a kind of expression of the deeper protestant conception contained in the creeds and confessions of the church it's that deeper protestant conception that van till is so brilliantly and comprehensively applying to the issues of his day and that really has to be emphasis given all of the emphasis that we can give it i think uh i i would just say uh that that uh your your last section on idealism i think should put to bed any accusations that van till is an idealist and i would say that with with the whole course in view that that there is a clarity and a depth and a breadth that is i've not seen in other presentations uh and we know that that this is a kind of this is a prospectus for a whole series of courses right you get this one and then out of this we'll do we'll develop uh several other ideally pardoned upon several other courses that will deep go into more detail than you do even here but i just want to say the clarity depth and breadth uh of the presentation is one that i wish i had had when first introduced to dr van till's work it would it it would have contributed greatly to the practical absorption of his material and use of his apologetic in my life yeah i wish i had it myself uh we gotta say the course is available online right now it is for free this is uh friday uh well in the podcast publish time this should be friday july 24th 2020. so if you head on over to reformedforum.org academy you should see a list of courses and uh this would be one of them an introduction to the theology and apologetics of cornelius van till you can register for free if you don't already have an account they're free accounts and then you can register for the course and start taking it so again there there are 43 i believe i i'm pretty sure that's the correct number but at least uh five hours and about 15 minutes of instruction on video we did it in studio we have three camera angles we did our best we're getting we keep getting better and better but i think this turned out really nicely better than our previous work which also turned out well um but we um have this broken down into eight segments uh and then each of the eight segments has a corresponding quiz so as you watch the videos and do the reading with the reading schedule that we've supplied then you can follow along and take the questions that that help to reinforce the main points of the lectures the videos and you can do self-assessment because the the system the platform will tell you you know the questions you got wrong and then you can know if you should go back and review some material before moving on to the other material and you can progress through the course and then hopefully we'll have the next one out by the time you finish if not then then head on over and take some of our other courses in the meantime until we get the next one produced and distributed and finally i do also want to mention and just wet the appetite that we are in the works of of creating other forms other learning opportunities so um we don't have it all worked out in terms of the schedule and the logistics of it as of yet but i do want people to know that we are developing online study groups or what we're what we call cohorts where you will be able to uh to apply and uh to to become a member a part of a cohort for uh online study and uh as it looks right now it'll probably be once a week for about an hour uh probably for eight weeks and you'll be able to to be in a group with perhaps in the ballpark of about 10 students uh as well as uh dr tipton leading the the discussion and uh you'll come prepared by watching the lectures by um you know doing the quizzes and doing the readings but then come for a weekly discussion group where you can work out the ideas in in groups uh we can in in many ways try to reproduce the dawson case society and the experience of learning on the front porch which i always found to be uh the place where i integrated and applied where i really came to own you know the material i was learning in the classroom so this would be beneficial not just for um people new to van till although we encourage people new to van till with the basic understanding of uh you know of reformed theology that you you can learn and participate and grow from this but also uh seminary students uh who would like to augment their education and uh and supplement it in in ways with this uh reach uh this rich and deep theology of vantil and even those who who are ministers pastors and other academics who are already out there that have been reading and interacting with reformed apologetics for many many years you will grow and be richly blessed i myself was was tremendously benefited by um by watching these lectures and working through the material i know jeff has as well and many other theologians so this is something um in which everyone everyone can benefit so we encourage you to head on over and sign up no matter where you are and we're working on raising some funds to try to get translations as well as we speak we have 37 countries represented at reformed academy and we are expecting that to grow and we welcome people from all over the world to come and participate and take our free courses and we're trying our best to uh to raise the necessary funds so that we can get those videos um closed captioned in english as well as translated in a variety of language so languages so if you're interested in that please visit us online you can contact me through the contact form or you can also uh donate at reformedforum.org donate it's a big mouthful but thanks brothers for joining me today and uh and sharing this information with everybody and we want to thank you for for watching and listening and we hope everyone joins us again next time on christ the center

Channel: Reformed Forum

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Id: yS3ZwSd8LP8

Length: 54min 35sec (3275 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020