Van Til Group #2 — The Doctrine of God

[Music] welcome to christ the center your weekly conversation of reformed theology my name is camden busey i'm back in grace lake illinois the reformed forum studio delighted to have with me some good friends to talk about an important subject uh continuing on in our conversation of van till's defense of the faith we have dr carlton nguyen who serves as a minister as a pastor down in westminster pca in atlanta georgia welcome back carlton it's good to see you today thank you camden it's wonderful to be here yes we love your your new digs and uh all the brilliant books that you have in the background for those looks like you have two copies of bob inc oh you got one machine and one bobbing but they look similar from a distance yeah i've got a couple of uh of bobbing books behind me i discovered today that i somehow have two copies of volume two which i'm very pleased about i don't know how i stumbled on a second copy one's marked up and one is clean and it's in my top five of the time favorites yeah yeah how in the world did we get along without the rd back in the early 2000s late 90s anyway we have with us also dr lane tipton who's pastor of trinity opc in eastern pennsylvania and a fellow here at reform forum in biblical and systematic theology welcome back lanes good to see you too camden it is great to see both of you brothers and i am truly delighted to be here as uh as listeners may know who've been with us for a little while uh we are embarking on a new van till group uh for quite some time i think we've done 66 episodes now with a couple excursies uh where lane and i have been uh talking and commenting on voss's book biblical theology all the new testaments we do that really once a month ends up being maybe about 10 per year and uh we thought along with carlton with this tremendous idea where we would walk through uh van till's book the defense of the faith now we're working through first edition copies here although there are three editions uh the second edition is more abridged the third edition includes annotations by dr scott oliphant at westminster theological seminary uh so we're commenting on this and walking through it um at a regular pace we're gonna you know find out where our stride is so it's been quite some time maybe about a month and a half two months since we did episode one but now we're in episode two and uh we're going to carry on with a discussion of the doctrine of god now you can find this even if you don't have the first edition we're in part one chapter one section one the doctrine of god which is pages 23-29 in the first edition but before we open up and talk about the doctrine of god and van till's discussion here it's important that we do so in context and understand what van till is addressing and why he's talking about these basics in theology and systematic theology no less in a work on apologetics carlton i was wondering if you could uh remind us where we are in the subject why vantill's talking about polemics and and why this at this point early on in the book yeah thanks camden i would love to do that uh if the listeners remember we did our first episode on the introductory material to this book where van till says that the primary reason he wrote this book is to set forth in positive fashion a biblical approach to apologetics he says he's doing this not only for students of the reformed tradition but also for critics i think implied in that is a call to those in the reformed tradition to really reflect on our own hearts our own methods as we talk about theology maybe repenting of less biblical inconsistent uh forms of reasoning in our theology and in our approach to apologetics but secondly vantil says he's writing this to address contemporary objections uh to his thought and to his apologetic method now no sooner does he speak of these contemporary objections and he dives right into them and uh if the listener wants to go back to that earlier episode we tried to give a taxonomy a sort of classification of these contemporary objections largely coming from his own dutch colleagues many of which wrote articles against van till in the calvin forum journal but uh i think lane i think we settled on this uh this description of these contemporary objections as as being on the one hand um advancing an infection thesis uh namely that van till's theology has been so thoroughly infected by non-christian thought and especially non-christian philosophy uh principally idealism that he has severely departed from the reformed tradition but but in addition to this infection thesis we have a rejection thesis uh that is van tyl's opponents argue that van till also takes the reformed tradition in such a way that he finds no point of contact with any non-christian thinker at all and van till is making the obvious point that his critics are themselves contradictory in their allegations is he so infected with non-christian philosophy that he's no longer christian or is he so resolutely uh committed to the uniqueness of the christian faith that he has no point of contact when dialoguing with unbelievers now van till is going to concede he's going to recognize that his opponents concede certain points about his own position they too acknowledge the chasm of difference between christian and non-christian thought they too recognize in van till that he acknowledges common grace insights in various non-christian thinkers as he puts it truth as far as it goes but after vantil does all this with respect to his contemporary critics he says we're not going to understand the criticisms well enough unless we first understand the structure of his thought so leaving those contemporary critics aside for the moment van till launches in part one into the structure of his own thought and one of the first things he says is we are interested in defending the christian faith as a unit we are intent on taking all of the deepest presuppositions revealed in the scriptures concerning god and creation and man and covenant image and christ and the atonement and we're seeking to advance the christian faith as revealed in the old and new testaments of holy scripture and he says the way that christianity has been taught as a unit is under various logical headings in systematic theology and so van til's approach is going to be to take up those logical headings uh beginning with the doctrine of god to advance his own thoughts so that we might understand his distinctively reformed apologetic and be able to understand his answers to his contemporary critics so there you go in this in this episode i think we're probably just going to be able to talk about uh van tilt's wonderful and foundational discussion of the doctrine of god maybe teasing out certain features of his discussion that are relevant for apologetics but but understanding van tyl in his own terms as he reaffirms a classically reformed understanding of who god is that's very different from other approaches and that's what vantal is seeking to do is to demonstrate a fundamentally consistent and faithful biblical apologetic but for van til a biblical apologetic is also reformed apologetic because the reformed theology and the reformed approach to defending the faith is the most faithful to scripture so these are not differences or an apologetics is not some sort of arbitrary choice so the way we defend the faith is not just whatever method we decide to do he's seeking to advance a very specific god the god who has revealed himself in a very specific way so elaine as vantill starts he speaks about systematic theology and specifically the doctrine of god being of fundamental importance why is that so significant before we even talk about how to defend the faith well it's it's really i guess from the outset showcasing the distinctive character of van till's method for him to say that because for the doctrine of god to be of fundamental importance van till is simply saying that before we speak of what we're defending we have to know the god who has revealed himself we have to know that he is and we have to know what he is and so by fundamental ventil means that the doctrine of god is of most basic structural significance for us if for no other reason than this the most basic distinction that van tull makes in his apologetic and the most basic relation that he programmatically sets forth is the creator creature distinction and the creator creature relation and as we begin our apologetic ventile wants us to recognize that what we believe about god in the creator creature distinction what we maintain about his identity in the creator creature relation will have a governing influence on every other topic that we address so you could think of it this way that before we talk about man before we talk about jesus christ and sin before we talk about salvation and the church the most basic issue that we have before us is the character of the god who has made himself known and until we understand that until we get a grasp on his nature we're not going to be in a position to understand how we should defend or express unapologetic in light of that character and so van till's taking us to what is i think characteristically within a biblical augustinian and reformed frame of reference he's taking us to the foundations of apologetics which really does begin with the doctrine of god and so van till says naturally the doctrine of god is of fundamental importance to us lane do you think that it is fair to say that when van till says the that must precede uh the how or that our defense must presuppose who god is do you think it's fair to say that already implied in this discussion is a question of method of how we know who god is that is by way of his self-revelation certainly through nature but especially given the fall through scripture it seems to me that vanto places such a premium on knowing who god is at the outset of his discussion that we can't adequately address that question without self-consciously articulating a revealed and reformed conception of god over against the wild panoply of idols that the human heart is prone to construct when not self-consciously submitting to the scriptures of god in other words the kind of god we have in mind needs to be self-consciously distinguished from say friedrich schleiermacher's living god who is uh the the wence as he puts it of our religious experience or or carl bart's um uh event notion of god beyond all human apprehension or or wolfheart panenburg's uh power of the future or uh gordon kaufman who taught at harvard divinity school said the word god is just a human construct by which we order the world all of these things and we could go even maybe to be a little more controversial in into the ancient period and say aristotle's unmoved mover um all of these things are are non-christian substitutes of who god is so am i rushing ahead or is it fair to say the methodology questions already at least implied here well ventil is explicit later in this book that the starting point the method and the conclusion are interdependent and mutually contextualizing at every point and here relatively speaking he's not yet discussing method and he's not yet discussing conclusion this is starting point and that starting point is the god not of rational reflection not the god of community experience but this is the god who in his self-contained sovereign triune identity reveals himself in the works of creation in an act of voluntary condescension we call covenant and makes himself known to the creature and is himself as van til is going to say our interpretive concept everywhere he says that in common grace in the gospel but that's here so carlton i think you're very insightful to bring that up at this point remembering that the starting point the method and the conclusion are always mutually contextualizing features in a reformed theology and apologetic but because we can't say everything at once and because we can't yet get to method and conclusion i think you're very wise to remind us here that when we have this starting point we have such a starting point the triune self-contained god immutable and impassable in his relation to the creature because of our method we are beginning with god because we meet him in his self-revelation and as bovink and the reformed tradition made explicit we have no knowledge of god at all apart from his self-revelation his self-disclosure to us as creatures and so yes i think that's really important because it keeps us from grounding theology in some kind of rational function of man or some communal interpretation of experience that is is in one way or another isolated from or not dependent on the outset on the revelation of god so yes i think that's a wonderful point to make so on that front what are the things that van till starts to address immediately i mean we could start under several different headings uh we spoke about bob ink earlier bovink likes to start very early on with the names of god that's how he reveals himself and we learn things about the names of god van till seems here uh at least starting on page 25 to start to address the attributes of god which is also very significant and important place to begin and he does so using a traditional distinction between the incommunicable and the communicable attributes but what do we see about van till and his approach to theology proper even in the way he starts to to speak what i love about this section camden is that fantal is going to give us quick but profound snapshot looks at the attributes of god beginning with the incommunicable attributes and then moving to the communicable attributes now he's a he's a faithful follower and at times critic of hermann bovink and he's going to end up saying some things uh that make it clear that the communicable and incommunical need to be taken together and um and he's going to speak more explicitly later on as to method how do we how do we arrive at these attributes by way of revelation but it seems to me that he's very clearly following the order that bobbing lays out in volume two of his reform dogmatics i've got the index or the table of contents open independence immutability infinity unity and simplicity is the order of the incommunicable attributes and this is basically the exact same order that van till uses in his discussions carlton i think that's an important historical theological point that needs to be reiterated so i i just want to butt in and just say that and along the lines of what lane just lectured on down at mid-america reform seminary if people haven't seen that yet the videos are available lane did a two two-lecture series on vantille's strenuterian theology reformed a revisionist in which he demonstrated much of van till's sources that van till's leaning upon bobink and others explicitly and for us if we don't know dutch bovink was introduced to the world other than our reasonable faith which has now been you know reworked and published under its um more faithful title the wonderful works of god in english prior to 2003 we didn't have the dogmatics van till did he's dutch he reads dutch he also had voss's dogmatics and he was also fluent in german so van till has access to many things of which the anglophones exclusive anglophones didn't and somewhat that has been lost upon many people in the united states particularly critics of van till who assume he is just making stuff up and inventing theology and apologetics on the fly he is explicitly developing uh what his colleagues have done not just here in the united states he he mentions early on he's he's leaning upon john murray and just telling you what john murray said and saying this is my view but it's his job to do the systematics i don't do that as well as in the background very clearly leaning upon bob inc and vos that's not an imposition of bob income vos fans imposing it on ventil after the fact it's an historical point that helps us understand what van till was doing in the first place yeah i think that's really good camden i i maybe one of the reasons van tilt moves so quickly through these attributes is because he takes it as a given yeah that these are understood by the reader they've been articulated at length um by bob inc and so he's just going to walk through them very quickly but what he does say i find fascinating at key points and so um you know maybe we could just take a brief moment and look at some of these attributes he he starts with a saity and he writes on page 25 by this is meant that god is in no sense correlative to or dependent upon anything beside his own being i'm i'm tempted to uh nickname dr tipton lane no correlativity tipton and uh i want to know in a snapshot look lane why divine acidity is so critical uh to van till so no correlativity tipped and take it away well i'm just following cornelius no correlativity van tell he i think what we have to appreciate here is when van till brings in that term not correlative to here's what he's affirming he's affirming that god is self-contained self-complete and independent of all things here's the key not only in himself prior to and apart from creation but in relation to creation so it's it's it's critical to appreciate this it's typical for theologians maybe not steeped in bovink or the reformed tradition to say that the acidity of god is simply talking about god in himself wholly apart from his relation to creation but what van till's wanting us to recognize especially using that language of correlativity is that the moment god relates to that which is not god in his sovereignly willed work of creation god is and this is italicized god is and remains absolute self-sufficient and self-contained independent of the creature and that means he is not acted upon or determined by the creature at any point in his relation to the creature and so this is a this is something that really is critical to understand apart from relation to creation and in that relation god is self-contained self-complete absolute and the idea of of mutually dependent relation to creation where god and the creation are equally submerged in a process of historical development that's what then till right up front wants to deny and in its place he confesses this thoroughgoing doctrine of god's independence it's beautiful yeah that's very helpful um one of the things i love that he's going to bring out a little bit later is that this notion of divine absoluteness is a definite biblical conception of absoluteness and if you go back to bob inc in that second volume i know we're talking about van till here but bob inc is at pains to say that this notion of absoluteness is not the abstract uh absoluteness of of philosophical thought that would seek to um abstract certain features from creation in order to arrive at a master concept which which on that approach would end up being an empty absolute uh this absolute when we speak of the being of god is an infinitely full and rich and wonderful living absoluteness of being and this is the presupposition for all of god's activity in space and time as he reveals himself as the absolute immutable god at every point and so the the listener needs to get accustomed to having a definite conception of divine absoluteness a definite conception of tri-personality a definite conception of the creator creature distinction and relation as we move ahead but i'm going to hold off on a particular point that i want to make until we get there just quickly uh before we move on too far this is a a sidebar thought but it's building on what both of you brothers said one reason van till might move through this so quickly in his dependence on bobbing is that a number of these men who criticized him were themselves dutch theologians and so they would be very familiar with bovink and i think van till moving so quickly following seriatum the topics that bavink treats in his rd2 is saying to them in almost encoded language brothers i am following bovink i'm being orthodox as far as i understand it as it's represented by bobbing and the starting point here is if you're going to follow bovink you cannot affirm correlativity at any point the relationship of immutability to the acidity of god is worth pointing out he says naturally god does not and cannot change just stop well he goes on to make it explicit since there's nothing besides his own eternal being on which he depends now the point that van till's making here is one that's just basic and and carlton's already said it really well that this infinite fullness of god's personal being which is living and active and self-contained self-complete and fully actual it is that being that comes into view when we think of god not only in terms of the eternal processions internal to the being of god but especially when we think about the missions of god in relation to creation and i'll just point out two things from the text that ventil uses malachi 3 6 and there's a little typo in the original it's james 1 7 but we would all know that it's james 1 17. those are kind of two of the great texts that anchor this and i'll just put it briefly and and then we can elaborate on it malachi 3 6 says this i the lord do not change therefore you sons of jacob are not consumed what's the point the point is that a covenantal god is not one who has taken accidental mutable contingent properties to himself submerged himself into the historical process and become conditioned by creation and by time and change rather the covenant god is the absolute god the covenant god is identical exhaustively to the self-sufficient self-contained absolute god and james 1 17 makes that so explicit in giving every good and perfect gift god does not change like shifting shadows so rather than his actions involving some change internal to him or some actualizing of a passive potentiality he has within him what we have here are the actions of a self-contained god from beginning to end and so there's no room in van till's thought here for a covenantal god who in his covenantal dealings with man somehow becomes mutable or changes in that relationship to put it negatively what do you think about this work i love how he puts it god does not change cannot change since there is nothing besides his own eternal being on which he depends it seems to me van tyl would have to say negatively were god to depend upon something be besides his own being in light of malachi 3 6 and james 1 17 the very promises of god in his covenant faithfulness would be threatened yes and the gospel fabric would begin to disintegrate and if we bring vos into the equation and the pauline eschatology when he talks about the very character of eternal life is a kind of i know i'm getting ahead of myself here a kind of replication of the fullness of life that is intrinsic to who god is then we begin to see that the very character of our unbreakable bond of fellowship with god is itself a reflection of the immutable living being of god himself we don't enter into that being we don't become participants in that being we don't become divine ourselves but in our covenant fellowship with god in the confirmed fellowship that we have through the lord jesus christ what we're getting is a revealed analogy an eck type in fellowship with god of the glory of his own immutable being brothers when we sacrifice this we sacrifice the integrity of the gospel and the very fabric of eternal life in jesus christ and i love how van till is is is implying this in his affirmation of this attribute of god in say yes and and just to to say one thing in addition to to to supplement that point and um tell me if this is a good way to put it and if not let's fine tune it more but for van till this is not simply a point of theological orthodoxy it is that to be sure but i think for van till this is what preserves the integrity and assurance of true religion that we can trust in god and have a a religious foundation and certainty for that religious foundation which is an immutable god a god that doesn't change and um and so there's there's really nothing of greater practical religious value than a robust confession of god's immutability amen amen okay well what about uh why don't we just touch on infinity a little bit what is significant about the infinity of god how does it flow from his society and his immutability van till says his infinity it needs to be understood with respect to time and with respect to space so so now we're getting into um at least um by way of derivation the creator creature relation uh god in himself is eternal and immense and this has implications for the creator creature relation inasmuch as god uh does not experience a succession of moments in history along with us as temporal creatures nor is god included in or confined by space as the absolute immutable infinite god and yet god sees all things in one clear certain and unerring view and he is not absent from any point of space as the infinite immense god so we're getting the mysterious character of the creator creature relation uh creeping in here as we think about the attribute of divine infinity elaine anything to add to that oh that that's beautiful just a couple of thoughts one by god's providence we just had a voss group on jehovah's relation to time and space yeah yeah good it really really congeals here but um you could put it in in two ways one positive way one negative way god is above space yet everywhere present in it god is above time yet everywhere present in it but god is not changed in any sense by his relation to space or time and i would just say this that all forms of theological rationalism will posit at some point spatial and temporal qualities that god somehow takes on when he relates to creation and as you just summarized carlton ventil will have none of that it would be a rationalistic move to say that somehow the infinite and eternal god when he relates to space and time becomes like those things in space and time it would be a fundamental confusion of the creator and the creature to speak or think that way how then does the unity of god relate i mean there's so much of these themes are similar to that voss group and it makes you think that you know van till obviously was leaning upon vos but they're all reading and interacting with similar material but when we're speaking of the infinity of god and also the acai the independence and the immutability it would entail also that we have some sort of unity of god otherwise we're positing different aspects of god some different than others how does van till utilize the the unity of god and how does that really come into play especially as we move on towards discussing the trinity eventually yeah just as we distinguish when we're speaking of the infinity of god we distinguish between his infinity with respect to time and with respect to space so too when we talk about the the unity of god we have to make a distinction between and vantale does it here uh the unity of singularity by which he means the numerical oneness of god there is one god one being one mind one will one eternity so the singularity uh the unity of singularity and then uh the uh the unity of simplicity yeah and um before i go any further on the on the numerical oneness of god let me just say publicly on record for all to hear that lane's lecture recently at mid-america on the trinitarian theology of antelope which you referenced camden in my opinion and i told lane this earlier was a master class in trinitarian theology and central to his exposition of van till's trinitarian theology was that he was following old princeton and old amsterdam by way of the hodges especially a.a hodges commentary on the westminster confession and bob inc with respect to the numerical oneness of god who is triune and it was just i just commend it to the listener to go and listen to that lecture a couple of times but that being said that being said in van till's discussion of simplicity let me just read something that will dovetail with everything we've said so far this is on page 26 he says the attributes of god this is an entailment of simplicity the attributes of god are not to be thought of otherwise than as aspects of the one simple original being the whole is identical with the parts then he says this on the other hand the attributes of god are not characteristics that god has developed gradually they are fundamental to his being the parts together form the whole so without diminishing one bit our confession of numerical oneness we affirm a god who is his attributes right even as we distinguish among those attributes on the basis of his revelation and we affirm that no matter how much god reveals himself differently and acts differently and speaks differently in time and space we dare not conclude from that that god's attributes somehow develop gradually through space and time because as van tyl says they are fundamental to his being and what we're getting is a disclosure of his attributes a revelation of who he is at different times in different ways through redemptive history i think it's worth mentioning up front because vantille here is not at all contradicting the westminster confession of faith which very clearly says god is not composed or he's not a body made of body parts or passions when he says when van tel says the whole is identical with the parts he's not speaking of a complex god or a composite god parts is used very loosely there perhaps if we're speaking more precisely that word shouldn't have been used at all nevertheless we speak of the attributes of god but whenever we're speaking of an attribute of god we're not speaking of the fact that god is built of blocks or legos or something that that we has love and joy and peace and justice and infinity and a saity and then all of these form together like some cosmic voltron and into into the triune god no god is god he's father son and holy spirit three persons subsisting in one essence and there are attributes we can we can that he that he is but he is the attributes not composed of the attributes yeah very good yeah that's that's very helpful camden and and and i think what van till's wanting us to recognize a different way to put this is that there are no accidental properties that god adds to himself when he relates to creation or either by way of his eternal decree where he decrees to relate to creation or by the work of creation itself or in his special act of providence by which he voluntarily condescends to offer himself to adam as his as adam's blessedness and reward for covenantal obedience in in no instance does god in his relation to creation take on or will himself to have new accidental properties that would make him composite yeah maybe not originally but he would become composite in history and vanta said absolutely not he's neither composite or complex before during or after he is who he is always in every point and the you know but but contrary to the reformed view here you can you can think of socieans hegelians process theists open theists all of them affirm this tenet in some way they're going to be cosmetic differences to be sure but fundamentally all want to say schleimarker and bart you can add to this group that when god relates to creation in that relation god himself changes by way of either permutation alteration or addition he takes something new to himself will something he did not have before takes on or gains attributes as accidents that are added to who he is essentially and there are a number of examples of that from ancient into the modern era where god's simplicity is affirmed as long as god is not thought of as related to creation but once he relates to creation that simplicity is altered that that simplicity might be maintained but then there are new properties that qualify and characterize god in his relation to creation properties like ignorance mutability passability emotional and intellectual development and once that happens it's a baseline departure from this classical doctrine of simplicity this reformed and biblical conception of simplicity that van till is advocating following bobbing lane i appreciate your ever-present insight into this topic and camden very adequate and fitting words to add i'm sure we're all we're all in agreement in what you articulate in the importance of articulating it one thing i want to add that may be helpful for listeners is that the idea that new attributes would need to develop gradually for god to interact with his creation rests on the idea that god in and of himself is unable to relate to creation and so again as we proceed in this discussion of van tilt he's going to say later and i don't know if we want to go there now um on page 27 that we that we can't attach a non-christian conception of divine imminence to a non-christian conception of divine transcendence and actually get a biblical conception of the god world relation and to posit that new attributes need to develop gradually or that god takes on new attributes in order to relate to creation presupposes i would argue a non-biblical conception of divine transcendence in as much as it holds that god in and of himself prior to and apart from the world is somehow inhibited by his divine assaity that a sadie is is like a it's like a cage that keeps god from relating to the world it's a if we were to take an unbiblical notion we mentioned earlier an abstract notion of divine absoluteness and say it it's a deistic conception uh and what does a deistic conception need it needs the addition of some kind of mechanism that would achieve eminence or relation well already you've started with a deistic conception of divine transcendence that's going to require some kind of maneuver to get god in touch with creation the answer is not a mix and match kind of theologizing but it is a recognition of the biblical conception of god in himself who out of the fullness of his being makes a completely free uh transition as as vos puts it uh from his own eternal necessary existence to creating the temporal existence of the created world in relation to him this is something that god needs nothing beyond himself in order to do and accomplish speaking of this notion of unbiblical transcendence and unbiblical notion of imminence i have a little illustration that i want to run by you guys okay you remember the uh the the little game called jenga sure yeah where you you know you make the little tower of the little wooden blocks and you take turns tap tap tapping out a little jenga block and the last person to tap one out makes it fall okay we can't do theology like a jenga tower some people want to take a philosophical system okay and they want to recognize what's non-christian about it but they hear things in it that sound good like god is one or god is immutable or something of that nature they take they take their finger and they start tapping at a little piece of that theology very carefully very deliberately and they tap tap tap tap tap tap tap and they want to slide out that wooden block and then they get a christian block and they want to slide in the christian block and tap tap tap it into place what you get is an unholy mixture of christian and non-christian blocks and they cannot stand together the tower is going to fall what we need to do is take the non-christian jenga tower and we need to in love with patients pulverize it into dust second corinthians 10 5. destroying strongholds and replace it with a thoroughly christian tower that is not even a jenga tower it's an organically complex pluriform and related body of revealed truths serving the covenant relation that god has established with creatures so that we might know him as his redeemed people so i don't know if a reform for a mug is in the order but no jenga tower theologized carlton i love that um it you know and when when we're thinking about this relation of god to the creation the idea that god needs some additional contingent mutable relational properties in order to relate to creation shared by all forms of correlativism that we just talked about earlier that's really laid to rest when you remember the theology of the new relation now i'm going to just borrow from vos here from his reform dogmatics 177 and 8 volume 1. and and we've said it before so i'll be brief in summary here but in the sovereignly willed new relation of creation the creature changes the relation changes but the god who relates does not change in the relation and that's the specific point of mystery that in the new relation god himself does not change as the relation changes and as the creature changes and the temptation for all of these forms whether it's that evangelical form we talked about a second ago or whether it's a hegelian or modernist conception whatever form we're talking about it's that in the new relation there is reciprocal newness for god and the creature together it's a reciprocal newness where both are changing because god has taken to himself willed for himself to have the properties and qualities that qualify creaturely change in time and space and it's just that that that that jenga block is what we don't need yeah um i love that i'm for that mug by the way i think that'd be a beautiful oh i don't want the mug i want to make the game we're going to have to have a table game brother one of the things that's going to become clear as we work through this book is just to add this point on it we have to remember the point about common grace and uh the the form of the block may look similar to the formal features of a non-christian jenga tower so materially we have to pulverize the non-christian tower okay but please don't hear me say that there aren't formal features of certain forms of non-christian thought that resonate outwardly notice all of the qualifiers i'm giving with a christian worldview sure and so there are common grace features but what i'm saying is in removing that block we can't just deploy it in a christian system without significant adjustment within the organism of biblical revelation that's the main point well to mix metaphors vantill be very clear about his illustration of borrowed capital or we might even say stolen capital because what what is quote unquote christian or the common grace features that belong to a non-christian structure have been stolen to begin with that's that's the point and it's not to we don't extend this metaphor it's not to say that the christian view is a blockhouse view that you could take parts of it out that's that's not that's mixing the metaphors in inappropriately but whatever features we find that would be helpful or you know useful in the non-christian system are not the non-christians to begin with they stole them from the christian uh worldview in the christian system and um from the christians pile of jingle blocks i think we better say something and i know this discussion relates to his section on communicable attributes but van tell doesn't give as much description of communicable attributes he lists spirituality invisibility any and he spends some time with omniscience so and and one point i thought was useful in in pointing out his commentary on omniscience is he says that god's knowledge of the facts of creation comes before the facts themselves exist whereas for us as creatures we must investigate the facts that already exist in order to know them for god knowledge of the facts come first and if you remember uh back in the uh objections his critics contemporary critics one of his critics um said if it and i'm quoting here if it is possible to say that god's thought is constitutive of facts is it not also necessary to say that the facts are constitutive of god's knowledge and therefore of god and the point that this particular critic is making is that van till is leaning into a philosophy of idealism here where the rational is the real the real is the rational and van tyl's going to try to rebut that here and later on page 234 in the book but i think it's important to map out uh how let me just ask this question maybe to you lane how is this point about god's thought being prior to the facts of creation not leading inexorably in an idealist direction for benthil well van till makes this point that on the top of page 27 god does not need to look beyond himself for additions to his knowledge in all forms of idealism and especially the um the the philosophy of absolute idealism god as the absolute principle of unity if you want to call it god idealists aren't uniform in doing that but that quote-unquote absolute comes to know space-time particularity in a symbiotic correlative mutual relation to it so that he comes to know facts in symbiotic interaction and reciprocal and mutual relation to those facts but not before and so the unfolding of the historical process is the unfolding of the knowledge of the absolute if you're thinking about absolute idealism but for van till knowledge of facts comes before the facts for god and this is the key this is the death of the idealist premise god does not need to look beyond himself for additions to his knowledge all forms of the absolute do and so that is a a fundamental antithesis to the way that the absolute comes to through history comes to know things as they occur yeah um this this really dovetails into one of the final sections in this um in this discussion on page 28 when he's talking about the personality of god and i know your mid-america lecture dealt directly with this material but insofar as god is absolute in his knowledge of himself and all things related to him insofar as he exhaustively decrees whatsoever comes to pass as the one in whom all intellectual and moral life is absolute and immutable van tyl wants to affirm that god is absolute personality and i find this to be such a helpful point of reflection and meditation as we think about uh the covenant relation that we enjoy with god that we are that we are related um as his image and in redemption to the god who is absolute in his personality certainly as the triune god as van till is going to affirm but when we speak of divine absolute personality what exactly are we affirming and why is it so important i'll just make reference to those lectures that i that i gave and give the briefest snapshot that i know that an entailment of the numerical unity of god's essence and an entailment of the divine simplicity is that god is a self-determined self-complete self-conscious personal being and in bovink's language he is an absolute personality and that absolute personality opens itself up in a three-fold differentiation i think again ventil right here is making reference to reform dogmatics 303 of bovink just as he has done in the attributes that come before and and so what he's what he's wanting us to recognize contrary to someone like gordon clark is that god is not an impersonal mute substance that somehow has three thought bundles included within it but that god is a supremely absolutely personal being and the way i put it wrote a dissertation years ago i'm revising trying to get to camden before christmas time for uh publication is this and lord willingness can happen stranger things man but um the the language i used in the title of the dissertation was the triune personal god and the idea there is that you can't look anywhere in god with his essence or the personal subsistences who are that undivided essence you can't find an impersonal speck or crevice in god there is nothing impersonal resident in his being or essence or nature or the persons who are that nature distinctly as they subsist entirely as it uh so that's the the short version of what i tried to develop in some detail in those two lectures that we did at mars that's excellent brother i where we're gonna go with this with van till is that to use your language the fact that there is no impersonal crevice or speck in the being of god as the absolute personal triune god is going to have as an entailment given creation that there is no crevice or speck of this created world in which we are not face to face with this living personal god and therefore obligated to think his thoughts after him under the light of his word and so right here uh oh what's the language you used with me years ago the cards are being drawn brother the cards are being drawn right here with respect to our abs with respect to our apologetic method our epistemology and our theology of the christian life it begins here and that's why the doctrine of god is of fundamental importance for the christian who is a theologian as well as an apologist thinking god's thoughts after him with respect to any speck of god's created world amen well that'll definitely lead us into vantilla's discussion of the doctrine of man and of course uh throughout this entire book we'll we will continue to explicate even his covenantal theology which uh helps us understand god man relation uh this is fundamental feature of van tils apologetic and i couldn't be more excited to talk about it and to work on it over the months and years with you two brothers so thanks so much carlton and lane for joining us today uh we do want to point people to the website head on over to reformedforum.org where you'll find information about all of our programs as well as our online courses van tills uh an intro to van tils apologetic is available already elaine taught that it's the first of eight planned courses in the apologetic and theology of cornelius van till we have recorded the second course which is on van till's trinitarian theology it's in the the works of being edited hopefully we'll be out by the end of the year and of course uh information and everything's available online you can subscribe to our email newsletter if you'd like to get updated on new publications and things including our newsletter so take a look at all that and i want to thank everybody for listening and we hope you join us again next time on christ the center

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Length: 59min 39sec (3579 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020