Here are some notes from Van Til's Chapter from The Infallible Word. I'll let the reader decide whether Van Til was represented accurately in this interview. Much ink has been spilled on presuppositionalism, but Van Til wrote primarily in terms of a classical Archetypal/Ectypal distinction in theology that had been obscured in theology after the rise of Cartesianism. He is not wholly novel as averred.
How is natural theology necessary?
Scripture does not claim to speak to man in any other way than in conjunction with nature. God's revelation of Himself in nature combined with His revelation of Himself in Scripture form God's one grand scheme of covenant relationship of Himself with man. The two forms presuppose and complement one another.
It was necessary in the garden as the lower act of obedience learned from avoiding the tree of knowledge of good and evil man might learn the higher things of obedience to God. The natural appeared in the regularity of nature.
After the fall, the natural appears under to curse of God and not merely regular. God's curse on nature is revealed along with regularity. The natural reveals an unalleviated picture of folly and ruin and speaks to the need for a Redeemer.
To the believer the natural or regular with all its complexity always appears as the playground for the process of differentiation which leads ever onward to the fullness of the glory of God.
What is the authority of natural revelation?
The same God who reveals Himself in Scripture is the God who reveals Himself in nature. They are of the same authority even if the former is superior in clarity than the latter. We are analogues to God and our respect for revelation in both spheres must be maintained and it is only when we refuse to act as creatures that we contrast authority between natural and special revelation. What comes to man by his rational and moral nature (created in God's image) is no less objective than what comes to him through the created order as all is in Covenant relationship to God. All created activity is inherently revelational of the nature and will of God.
What is the sufficiency of natural revelation?
It is sufficient to leave men without excuse for their sin and denying the God they know they are created to worship but insufficient at revealing the grace of God in salvation. Natural revelation was never meant to function by itself (as above) but it was historically sufficient as it renders without excuse. God's revelation in nature is sufficient in history to differentiate between those who would and who would not serve God.
What is meant by the perspicuity of natural revelation?
God's revelation in nature was always meant to serve alongside His special revelation. God is a revealing God and the perspicuity of nature is bound up in the fact that He voluntarily reveals. Both natural and special revelation would be impossible if God remained incomprehensible as He is in Himself (archetypal theology). Man cannot penetrate God as He is Himself - he cannot comprehend God. But created man may see clearly what is revealed clearly even if he does not see exhaustively. Man need not have exhaustive knowledge in order to know truly and certainly.
God's thoughts about Himself are self-contained but man is an analogue who thinks in covenant relation to the One who created him. Thus man's interpretation of nature follows what is fully interpreted by God. Man thinks God's thoughts after him - not comprehensively but analogically.
The Psalmist doesn't declare that the heavens possibly or probably declare the glory of God. Paul does not say that the wrath of God is probably revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Scripture takes the clarity of God's revelation for granted at every stage of human history. The God who speaks in Scripture cannot refer to anything that is not already authoritatively revelational of Himself for the evidence of His own existence. Everything exists that is His creation.
It is no easier for sinners to accept God in nature than it is for them to accept Him in Scripture. The two are inseparable in their clarity. We need the Holy Spirit to understand both. Man must be a Christian to study nature in a proper frame of mind.
How does Greek natural theology and the natural theology of Kant result in denying any rationality higher than itself?
Neither allow analogical reasoning to understand the world. They start from nature and try to argue for a god who must be finite in nature. It starts with a "mute" universe that has no revelation and makes it revelational only with respect to the autonomous mind of man. No distinction is made between Creator and creature.
Kant's great contribution to philosophy consisted in stressing the activity of the experiencing subject. It is this point to which the idea of a Copernican revolution is usually applied. Kant argued that since it is the thinking subject that itself contributes the categories of universality and necessity, we must not think of these as covering any reality that exists or may exist wholly independent of the human mind. The validity of universals is to be taken as frankly due to a motion and a vote; it is conventional and nothing more.
Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kant, assumed the autonomy of man. On such a basis man may reason univocally (have the same mind as God) and reach a God who is just an extension of the creature or he may reason equivocally and reach a God who has no contact with him at all. Man is left with either God being part of nature (pantheism) or being so transcendent that He cannot get into nature (deism).
We're now left with a world where the scientist supposedly interacts with the physical world and can learn about the world apart from any reference to God and "ministers" who speak about God's revelation that has no reference to history and interaction with the world. Man is fractured intellectually where reason deals with things of the world and faith deals with things that cannot affect reason or the world.
The very idea of Kant's Copernican revolution was that the autonomous mind itself must assume the responsibility for making all factual differentiation and logical validation. To such a mind the God of Christianity cannot speak. Such a mind will hear no voice but its own.
Just a quick question: Is this formally copyrighted? I ask because I want to reuse some of this material in front of people as a comedy routine. I might run a little off the path and improvise just to highlight the Pythonesque aspects. Ok?
The book is out of copyright. Feel free to laugh at Christian beliefs as medieval nonsense. I'm sure you'll find many in this culture who agree with you.
That’s a fascinating show. As to the method I was trained in evidential apologetics at Biola while studying in stacks at Westminster seminary in Escondido CA. A presuppositional institution. It was closer than BIOLA, 90 minute drive versus a 20 minute drive. Westminster had a considerable collection of evidentialist books due to the librarian being in evidentialist(even though Presbyterian).
Which method we use its a big issue, some say relational evangelism is the only way, some say presupposition is the only way. I found on light train trips 30 minute one way to San Diego in my commute each day, you have about 15 minutes to talk to someone, evidentialism fits nicely since a single point is sufficient. Norman L Geisler the grandfather of apologetics said: “Evidentlist apologists are one steppers, Classical apologists or two steppers.”
Occasionally I built friendships and we could talk on the train for months, cumulatively.
Paul rarely had time for relational apologetics. In ACTS it is recorded that he routinely steps outside the synagogue doors and engages , he deolegmai’d the people passing by.
‘As was his practice’
The Greek verb διαλέγομαι (dialegomai) primarily means to engage in a dialogue or discussion, often involving reasoning or argumentation
In the end chapter 18 of the book of Acts Apollos:
..he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully REFUTED the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
At the same time our STANDARD handbook of apologetics at BIOLA(a Baptist institution), was written by a Catholic philosopher.
Peter Kreeft
Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions
In the 90s when I attended BIOLA there were no decent writings on bioethics from a Christian viewpoint, that were not Catholic. I have engaged since the 90s with “First Things” magazine. An intended political gathering for Roman Catholics and hard-core evangelical and conservative Jews. A lot of cross pollination there.
So much the Catholic who developed the initial view of the inflationary big bang.
“In the chapters to follow we will consider Lemaître’s conception of the relation between science and religion, and survey his exceptional contributions to cosmology, where he was a real pioneer. But to briefly summarize here, Lemaître’s cosmology was built in two phases. In the first, Lemaître found independently of Friedmann that Einstein’s equations admit non-static cosmological solutions. Simultaneously, he took into account American observations of galaxy velocities, to which he gave a physical meaning by interpreting them as clues to an expanding universe. In a second phase, Lemaître dared an even bolder hypothesis, which was in part a logical extension of the theory of the expanding universe. If the universe is expanding, he reasoned, in the past it had to have been much denser and, long ago, was condensed into a “primeval atom” whose successive splits have shaped it as it is now.”
My goodness! This is so entertaining. It's like directly listening to Medieval thinkers. I mean, good god, what a flood of verbiage about superstitious nonsense. It almost even reminds me of Monty Python routines.
I always wonder what it is like to meet such people and sit and talk and hold back the hilarity. My goodness, man! Step in to modern times. There must be something useful you could offer rather than taking fiction so seriously!
Here are some notes from Van Til's Chapter from The Infallible Word. I'll let the reader decide whether Van Til was represented accurately in this interview. Much ink has been spilled on presuppositionalism, but Van Til wrote primarily in terms of a classical Archetypal/Ectypal distinction in theology that had been obscured in theology after the rise of Cartesianism. He is not wholly novel as averred.
How is natural theology necessary?
Scripture does not claim to speak to man in any other way than in conjunction with nature. God's revelation of Himself in nature combined with His revelation of Himself in Scripture form God's one grand scheme of covenant relationship of Himself with man. The two forms presuppose and complement one another.
It was necessary in the garden as the lower act of obedience learned from avoiding the tree of knowledge of good and evil man might learn the higher things of obedience to God. The natural appeared in the regularity of nature.
After the fall, the natural appears under to curse of God and not merely regular. God's curse on nature is revealed along with regularity. The natural reveals an unalleviated picture of folly and ruin and speaks to the need for a Redeemer.
To the believer the natural or regular with all its complexity always appears as the playground for the process of differentiation which leads ever onward to the fullness of the glory of God.
What is the authority of natural revelation?
The same God who reveals Himself in Scripture is the God who reveals Himself in nature. They are of the same authority even if the former is superior in clarity than the latter. We are analogues to God and our respect for revelation in both spheres must be maintained and it is only when we refuse to act as creatures that we contrast authority between natural and special revelation. What comes to man by his rational and moral nature (created in God's image) is no less objective than what comes to him through the created order as all is in Covenant relationship to God. All created activity is inherently revelational of the nature and will of God.
What is the sufficiency of natural revelation?
It is sufficient to leave men without excuse for their sin and denying the God they know they are created to worship but insufficient at revealing the grace of God in salvation. Natural revelation was never meant to function by itself (as above) but it was historically sufficient as it renders without excuse. God's revelation in nature is sufficient in history to differentiate between those who would and who would not serve God.
What is meant by the perspicuity of natural revelation?
God's revelation in nature was always meant to serve alongside His special revelation. God is a revealing God and the perspicuity of nature is bound up in the fact that He voluntarily reveals. Both natural and special revelation would be impossible if God remained incomprehensible as He is in Himself (archetypal theology). Man cannot penetrate God as He is Himself - he cannot comprehend God. But created man may see clearly what is revealed clearly even if he does not see exhaustively. Man need not have exhaustive knowledge in order to know truly and certainly.
God's thoughts about Himself are self-contained but man is an analogue who thinks in covenant relation to the One who created him. Thus man's interpretation of nature follows what is fully interpreted by God. Man thinks God's thoughts after him - not comprehensively but analogically.
The Psalmist doesn't declare that the heavens possibly or probably declare the glory of God. Paul does not say that the wrath of God is probably revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Scripture takes the clarity of God's revelation for granted at every stage of human history. The God who speaks in Scripture cannot refer to anything that is not already authoritatively revelational of Himself for the evidence of His own existence. Everything exists that is His creation.
It is no easier for sinners to accept God in nature than it is for them to accept Him in Scripture. The two are inseparable in their clarity. We need the Holy Spirit to understand both. Man must be a Christian to study nature in a proper frame of mind.
How does Greek natural theology and the natural theology of Kant result in denying any rationality higher than itself?
Neither allow analogical reasoning to understand the world. They start from nature and try to argue for a god who must be finite in nature. It starts with a "mute" universe that has no revelation and makes it revelational only with respect to the autonomous mind of man. No distinction is made between Creator and creature.
Kant's great contribution to philosophy consisted in stressing the activity of the experiencing subject. It is this point to which the idea of a Copernican revolution is usually applied. Kant argued that since it is the thinking subject that itself contributes the categories of universality and necessity, we must not think of these as covering any reality that exists or may exist wholly independent of the human mind. The validity of universals is to be taken as frankly due to a motion and a vote; it is conventional and nothing more.
Plato and Aristotle, as well as Kant, assumed the autonomy of man. On such a basis man may reason univocally (have the same mind as God) and reach a God who is just an extension of the creature or he may reason equivocally and reach a God who has no contact with him at all. Man is left with either God being part of nature (pantheism) or being so transcendent that He cannot get into nature (deism).
We're now left with a world where the scientist supposedly interacts with the physical world and can learn about the world apart from any reference to God and "ministers" who speak about God's revelation that has no reference to history and interaction with the world. Man is fractured intellectually where reason deals with things of the world and faith deals with things that cannot affect reason or the world.
The very idea of Kant's Copernican revolution was that the autonomous mind itself must assume the responsibility for making all factual differentiation and logical validation. To such a mind the God of Christianity cannot speak. Such a mind will hear no voice but its own.
Just a quick question: Is this formally copyrighted? I ask because I want to reuse some of this material in front of people as a comedy routine. I might run a little off the path and improvise just to highlight the Pythonesque aspects. Ok?
The book is out of copyright. Feel free to laugh at Christian beliefs as medieval nonsense. I'm sure you'll find many in this culture who agree with you.
That’s a fascinating show. As to the method I was trained in evidential apologetics at Biola while studying in stacks at Westminster seminary in Escondido CA. A presuppositional institution. It was closer than BIOLA, 90 minute drive versus a 20 minute drive. Westminster had a considerable collection of evidentialist books due to the librarian being in evidentialist(even though Presbyterian).
Which method we use its a big issue, some say relational evangelism is the only way, some say presupposition is the only way. I found on light train trips 30 minute one way to San Diego in my commute each day, you have about 15 minutes to talk to someone, evidentialism fits nicely since a single point is sufficient. Norman L Geisler the grandfather of apologetics said: “Evidentlist apologists are one steppers, Classical apologists or two steppers.”
Occasionally I built friendships and we could talk on the train for months, cumulatively.
Paul rarely had time for relational apologetics. In ACTS it is recorded that he routinely steps outside the synagogue doors and engages , he deolegmai’d the people passing by.
‘As was his practice’
The Greek verb διαλέγομαι (dialegomai) primarily means to engage in a dialogue or discussion, often involving reasoning or argumentation
In the end chapter 18 of the book of Acts Apollos:
..he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he powerfully REFUTED the Jews in public, demonstrating by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.
At the same time our STANDARD handbook of apologetics at BIOLA(a Baptist institution), was written by a Catholic philosopher.
Peter Kreeft
Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions
In the 90s when I attended BIOLA there were no decent writings on bioethics from a Christian viewpoint, that were not Catholic. I have engaged since the 90s with “First Things” magazine. An intended political gathering for Roman Catholics and hard-core evangelical and conservative Jews. A lot of cross pollination there.
So much the Catholic who developed the initial view of the inflationary big bang.
“In the chapters to follow we will consider Lemaître’s conception of the relation between science and religion, and survey his exceptional contributions to cosmology, where he was a real pioneer. But to briefly summarize here, Lemaître’s cosmology was built in two phases. In the first, Lemaître found independently of Friedmann that Einstein’s equations admit non-static cosmological solutions. Simultaneously, he took into account American observations of galaxy velocities, to which he gave a physical meaning by interpreting them as clues to an expanding universe. In a second phase, Lemaître dared an even bolder hypothesis, which was in part a logical extension of the theory of the expanding universe. If the universe is expanding, he reasoned, in the past it had to have been much denser and, long ago, was condensed into a “primeval atom” whose successive splits have shaped it as it is now.”
THE BIG BANG
REVOLUTIONARIES THE UNTOLD STORY
OF THREE SCIENTISTS WHO
REENCHANTED COSMOLOGY
JEAN-PIERRE LUMINET
page 81
Lemaître was a Belgian priest
My goodness! This is so entertaining. It's like directly listening to Medieval thinkers. I mean, good god, what a flood of verbiage about superstitious nonsense. It almost even reminds me of Monty Python routines.
I always wonder what it is like to meet such people and sit and talk and hold back the hilarity. My goodness, man! Step in to modern times. There must be something useful you could offer rather than taking fiction so seriously!