I'm very thankful for the invitation from Pastor Brian and the session here at Grace to come and speak to you this morning, this weekend on Cornelius Van Til. And I hope you will find it edifying and enjoyable. We like to hear stories, don't we? about people and so this first talk on Van Til the man is I'm looking forward to that especially. Let's just pray again for me and for all of us as we hear Lord Jesus Christ we ask in this weekend and in this talk even though we're talking about a man We know that he would most want you, Jesus, to be exalted. For us to see you today clearly, particularly your work of grace in Bantill's life, that all of us would be moved to love you more profoundly and to follow you with joyful submission and imitation all the days of our life. So we do thank you for this opportunity and ask that you would be exalted. And we know in that the Father will be delighted, for He loves to lift up the Son, even as you glorify the Father, and the Spirit to shed abroad in our hearts the knowledge of you, the true and living God. And so we pray these things in your name. Amen. So when they wanted a title for this series this weekend, I called it Vantill and the Reformation of Apologetics. Now, I'm assuming that most of you know that we use that term apologetics to refer to the defense of the Christian faith. when there are questions raised, sometimes very innocent questions. People just want to know why we believe what we believe. And so it's really the handmaid of evangelism. And if you get one thing out of this particular talk, I hope you'll see that Maybe more than even among his followers, for Van Til, apologetics was the instrument of evangelism. He was an evangelist, a personal evangelist, as we'll see. But then people ask questions, and so we answer questions. And then there are skeptics and critics that want to attack our biblical worldview, and that requires more sophisticated apologetics. But why the reformation of apologetics? Usually when we have these kind of conferences, again, we think about the heavyweights of the 14th, Jan Hus in Bohemia, for example, Wycliffe and Tyndale in the English-speaking world. And then the big guns, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Knox, those in the 15th and 16th century. We Presbyterians like to go back and look at the history surrounding the Westminster Confession of Faith and the foundation of Presbyterianism as we understand it in Scotland and England and then in North America. But Van Til seems like a kind of a late comer for a reformer. Well, some reformations take longer than others. Within our Reformed tradition, the decisive reformation of apologetics awaited the work of Cornelius Van Til, though he was not alone. Now, I understand that that assessment is debated, if not debatable, but I think it's fair and I hope you'll be persuaded as we look at Van Til today. This will resonate with you who are Orthodox Presbyterians. John Frame calls Van Til the consolidator of the sub-reformation set in motion within American Presbyterianism by J. Gressom Machin. Frame writes, Reformations tend to go through three stages which may be roughly but not sharply distinguished. confrontation, consolidation, and continuation. In the first stage, Reformers armed with biblical truth confront a crisis in the Church. In the second stage, the insights of the Reformers are used as a basis for a thorough rethinking of Christian theology and life. In the third stage, the church seeks to appropriate these insights and apply them to changing situations. He goes on to say, Machen was highly intelligent and scholarly, but more concerned with defending basic biblical truth than with the comprehensive and detailed elaboration of Reformed theology. He was eloquent, persistent, courageous, and single-minded. No matter what rebuke he suffered, he never backed away from his position on the issues, and he was willing to take, as it became necessary, the drastic step of breaking fellowship with others in the church. Machen's fundamental Reformation insight was that Orthodox Christianity and theological liberalism are not two differing Christian theological positions, such as Calvinism and Lutheranism, but rather are two different religions radically opposed to one another. For Machen, liberalism was not Christian at all, but was fundamentally opposed to Christianity as Christianity is defined in scripture and history. Machen saw their relationship as an antithesis, an opposition. They cannot be synthesized, blended. We can only choose one or the other. Van Til, with more than a nod to Abram Kuyper, applied Machen's antithetical thinking to neo-orthodoxy and other theological movements. Indeed, in some respects, Van Til's entire apologetic may be seen as a rethinking of the nature and implications of this antithesis. Van Til applied the concept of antithesis not only to unbelief in general and to the more recent variations of liberal theology, but also to the historic divisions within the Christian Church. The problem with Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Arminianism, and even less consistent Calvinism is that they compromise with unbelief. understood as the antithesis to true Christianity. So I think that assessment from Frame at least satisfies me that to speak of the reformation of apologetics brought about by Van Til and those who learn from Van Til, some are in this room, has led to an even more consistently biblical defense of the faith. And so that's the title for the weekend. Now, a word about my personal connection. I was in the last entering class at Westminster in Philadelphia in 1970 that had Van Til for the introductory class in apologetics for first year students. It was the largest class on campus. Now just recently, David King, a fellow OPC minister, posted on Facebook that he was in the last class that was taught by Van Til. But he was in seminary two years before me, and I'm quite sure it was Van Til that I was looking at in the lecture hall. So I told him we're going to have to compare notes and leaky memories to find out just when. But I can prove that I was there with Van Til This is a publicity shot from the seminary of the audience in a chapel service, and there is the grand man himself, and there is your humble servant right next to him. And for those of you who know Dennis Johnson, who taught in Westminster, California for a number of years next door, and that right there is the back of the head of Greg Bonson, one of Van Til's most faithful propagators and defenders. Actually, it was Greg Bonson's doing that got me to Westminster in the first place. Greg had known about Van Till and read many of his writings while we were in college together, and he used studying under Van Till as part of his sales pitch to persuade me to attend Westminster Seminary for at least a year. I had no intention whatsoever of becoming a minister of the gospel. Well, that class with Van Til, for me, was both an introduction to him and to his thought, but it was a revelation as well, as it turns out, a life-transforming one. It left a lasting impression, theologically and personally, right down to this day. Now, maybe a little disclaimer. You know the packet on the edge of your cigarettes or whatever? I'm not an expert in Bantill. I'm not approaching this as a scholar or an academic. I'm not even an apologetics junkie who likes nothing better than to argue over methodology endlessly on social media. And so I'm not going to talk about his method, his presuppositional method. There's many people who could do that better, many books that have been written on that. But I have in mind a more general audience who would like to know a little bit about who this fellow is. Maybe they've heard his name. And then I thought, talking about his relationship to culture in our second lecture, you would find most timely and relevant. So you're going to have to do some further reading, and you can ask me about bibliography if you want to read further in Van Til's Actual Apologetic. All right, back to the introduction. In this talk I want to say something about Van Til's life and ministry. I hope to provide a human context for you to understand and appreciate his thought. Unlike other 20th century figures, Van Til has not yet been the subject of a great deal of biographical research. Back in 1979, William White published Defender of the Faith, which was a popular and very favorable, some would say, hagiographic biography of Van Til, but it contains some wonderful information which I have drawn on. And then more recently, Cornelius Van Til, Reformed apologist and churchman by John R. Meather in 2008. He was, until recently, the historian for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. There's some biographical information in John Frame's book, Cornelius Vantill, an analysis of his thought, and in Greg L. Bonson's Vantill's apologetic readings and analysis. And then there have been selected articles and so forth. The question that arises is, where did somebody come up with such insights in this sphere of theology that we call apologetics? Is it just a matter of genius? Certainly, Van Til was a genius. The endowments that he received from his creator were remarkable indeed. But I think you will see from his life that at least as important, and perhaps even more important, was the fact that a pair of Christian parents and a succession of Christian school teachers faithfully did their job. Year in and year out, they discipled this man in the Word of God, in Holy Scripture. And his great insights and his great contributions to the kingdom are the fruit of that born from this tree planted deep in the soil of Holy Scripture. As the psalmist says, he is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season. Those who knew Van Til personally were powerfully impressed by the man's exemplary piety and deep conviction. But most of you will know him only through his writings, if you know much about him at all, and the writings of a controversialist like Van Til can be difficult because they may lead to a misimpression of the man. Indeed, many over the years remarked their surprise upon meeting Van Til in person that he was not at all what they expected from reading his books. In print, he was valiant and forceful in setting forth and defending the truth. He was incisive in his insights and devastating in his critique of every argument and every pretension that set itself up against the knowledge of God. But in person, he was in every way a Christian gentleman. He liked to quote the Latin proverb, suavitere in modo, gentle in mode, fortitere in re, forceful in truth, forceful in action. Well, a bit about his early life and education. He was born in Holland. in a farmhouse in Guttegast in 1895. If you want to mark it on your calendar, it was May 3, 1895. So we're coming up on the 130th anniversary next year of his birth and the 40th anniversary of his death. He was the sixth son out of eight children of Itty and Klezina Van Til. His father raised dairy cattle on a 40-acre farm. What a surprise, a Dutch dairy farmer. The family belonged to the Reformed Church of the Netherlands and in particular to the Afscheiding group, which was a minority in that denomination. Among other things, they disagreed with the church's idea of baptismal regeneration, which was a source of controversy. One of Van Til's early childhood memories, which he recollects in his little pamphlet, Why I Believe in God, involved an overnight stay in a hired man's room, a little room which he had built in the barn where the cattle were kept on his father's farm. Van Til was intrigued by that place, as you might imagine a young boy, and he wanted to be able to stay overnight there. I guess it would be like you camping out in the backyard in a tent with your children. He thought it would be wonderful. Well, his parents one night consented and he spent the night in the cow barn. While he lay there, he heard sounds which he thought he identified as the cattle rustling in their stalls. But then he heard other sounds that he couldn't recognize. And by the end of the night, he was pretty sure that the barn was haunted, and that menacing ghost surrounded him everywhere. Then he cried out, Luther-like, if you remember the story of Luther in the thunderstorm, in his sleep, Lord, convert me that I may be converted. I prayed that prayer that night as I had never prayed before." Though he didn't tell his parents about the experience at the time, he remembered that if he had told them, his parents would have comforted him with the assurance that there really were no such things as ghosts that needed to be feared. But more important, he said, They would have reminded him that with body and soul, in life and in death, he belonged to his Savior who died for him on the cross and rose again that his people might be saved from hell and go to heaven. He said, I should pray earnestly and often, they would say, that the Holy Spirit might give me a new heart so that I might truly love God instead of sin and myself. Van Til recalls how scripture surrounded him during his early years at home and in the church. The Word of God, he says, was a deep conditioning atmosphere for his family life. Quoting Van Til, ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter. But round about it all there was a deep, conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revival, the relative humidity was always very high. No showers of revival, but high humidity in his family. At every meal, the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. And get this, the Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the scripture story and that faith was a gift of God. I was conditioned in the most thorough fashion. I could not help believing in God, in the God of Christianity, in the God of the whole Bible. This regular prayer at every meal and daily Bible reading gave him a familiarity with the whole of Scripture, which, as we'll see, came out again and again, not only in his public writings, but also in his private testimony. He was baptized as an infant And he understood in retrospect that as soon as he could be able to understand, his parents would instruct him in all the matters of the Word of God by all the means at their disposal. And that is what they had promised. For that is what they had promised to do. This was accomplished in part by training in the Heidelberg Catechism, which was the confessional standard of the church that he belonged to. When he was old enough, he was sent to Christian school. There, Van Til recalls, I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all I knew or did. This broader Christian education gave him the proper setting for his salvation. The whole wide world gradually opened up through my schooling," he wrote, operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God, whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor. William White, one of Van Til's biographers I mentioned earlier, had this to say. There you have the ingredients that combine to shape godly lives in the home of Itty and Closina Van Till. To their offspring they bequeathed a love valued far above Ruby's, a pattern of strict but impartial discipline, exposure to a rich heritage of Calvinist theology, a God-centered life and worldview and minds filled with fragrant recollections of a happy home." I might just say a sidebar to those of you who are raising God's children in your families. It can get discouraging, and it's easy to give up. to start and stop and start again and stop again and start again. Stick with it. Pray and be faithful and God will bring the fruit. And even if you've got some covenant children that are straying just now, those seeds planted will not return void. And Van Til's testimony to that formative early training is so very, very important for all of us. Well, everything changed in the spring of 1905. His family determined to emigrate from Holland to the United States. Earlier, one of their sons had emigrated and settled near Hammond, Indiana, and as he wrote back with great stories about the opportunity in the United States, the rest of the family, faced with increasing difficulties and pressures at home, decided to move. Their ship arrived in New York City Harbor on May 19, 1905, just a few days after Van Til's 10th birthday. After a long, slow, and very uncomfortable train journey, they arrived at their son's home in Highland, Indiana. The family rented a house, and Van Til's father began to farm once again. Van Til loved farming and farm life. life close to the soil, and he frequently expressed that affection in his classroom teaching in later years. After 10 years in Highland, the family moved to Munster, Indiana. Again, here in America, the Vantills found a Christian school for their children. Vantill and his younger brother began to attend. There they learned to master English very quickly. Cornelius was nicknamed Big Klumpa, and his younger brother, Little Klumpa, a reference to the wooden shoes they wore. As William White points out, two important events took place during these years in Munster. Each would affect the future course of Van Til's life and his surface to God. The first was that he met a girl. That girl was named Raina Kluster, and it turned out that she would become his future wife. Just to jump ahead in the story, they married in 1925 after Van Til received his doctor's degree from Princeton Seminary, and they enjoyed 53 years of married life together, ending with Raina's death in 1978. They had only one son named Earl. The second thing that influenced him there in Munster was that he began to sense a call from God to the ministry. Now, this wasn't a Macedonian call type call, come over and help us. No bright revelation at a single moment. Rather, it was a growing conviction in Van Til's heart that he needed to think not simply about growing in the soil of his farm and bringing praise and glory to God thereby, but to labor in God's vineyard to bring the gospel to others and to nurture God's people. And that desire became a compulsion, a steady pull, a developing persuasion. And pursuing that call, he decided to study for the ministry at Calvin Preparatory School and College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He entered the preparatory school in 1914. Again, Van Til remembers, all my teachers were pledged to teach their subjects from the Christian point of view. All facts in all their relations are what they are because of God's all-comprehensive plan with respect to them. Thus, the very definition of things would not merely be incomplete, but basically wrong if God were left out of the picture. Van Til didn't come on to his notion of a transcendental approach to the Christian faith in a vacuum. He was taught that from a very early age. While at the prefatory school, Van Til was very homesick for his family. He missed his true love, Reina, as well, and he says he almost gave up and went home to the farm. almost scrapped his idea of becoming involved in the Christian ministry. He would just be a dairyman or a farmer. But he persevered. He stayed on to finish his studies. During these years of study, Van Til began to develop a love for and a proficiency in the study of philosophy. Here he first began to study the writings of Abram Kuyper, one of the great Dutch theologians and apologists. And Kuyper really became, in many ways, a guiding light early on for the development of Van Til's own philosophical thought. Van Til's goal was to seek a rural pastorate in his denomination where he could preach the gospel and minister to simple folk the simple truth that Jesus loves them and has shown grace toward them. But God, of course, had other plans. Van Til went to Princeton Seminary and University in 1921. He began his theological training at Calvin Theological Seminary, the seminary of his own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. But in his second year, Van Til was faced with a watershed choice, a decision that would affect the direction of his ministry from then on. Had he stayed on at Calvin, he might well have achieved his goal of serving in a rural church in his own denomination. He might have lived out his life in faithful but obscure service to Christ. It might have been that none of us would ever have heard of Cornelius Van Til. But in the providence of God, Van Til set his feet on another path. In 1922, he enrolled at Princeton Seminary and University. He was drawn by the internationally renowned Princeton Seminary faculty that included men like Gerhardus Voss, B.B. Warfield, J. Gresson Machen, Robert Dick Wilson, and C.W. Hodge, but also by the institution's historic commitment to the propagation and defense of Reformed theology and Presbyterian polity. He was also attracted by the fact that those students at the seminary could take classes at the same time at the university. And the philosophy department at Princeton University was well known, one of the best in the nation, headed up by Professor A. A. Bowman, the famous personalist philosopher Again, William White summarizes the challenge represented by this dual education in the seminary and in the university. Side by side, you have the university and the seminary. In the one, relativism ruled. In the other, absolute authority based on the authority of Scripture. On the one side of the street, there was skepticism and ambiguity. On the other, a certainty that grew out of the knowledge of God's revelation. Van Til's intellectual and spiritual upbringing thus, bringing up this far, was shaped almost exclusively by Christian assumptions. Now he encountered simultaneously both rich biblical teaching, but also the corrosive skepticism of the university. During his time at Princeton Seminary, he was profoundly influenced by Gerhardus Voss, a fellow Dutchman who was nearly at the end of an illustrious career at Princeton, a man noted for his biblical exegesis and theology. There's a famous photograph of Van Til taken in his office and hanging on the wall behind him over his shoulder is a portrait of Gerhardus Vos. It's a very symbolic kind of photograph. Traces of Vos' influence can be seen throughout Van Til's writings, although he doesn't mention him explicitly very often. These two men had such high regard for one another that when Voss died in 1949, Van Till was asked to officiate at his funeral. Van Till also made mention of the defense of the Christian faith that he learned from Robert Dick Wilson and J. Gressom Machen, of whom we'll say more in a moment. In due course, Van Til received a THM degree from the seminary in 1925, and then a PhD from the university in 1927. The interrelationship, professionally, theologically, and personally, between Van Til and J. Gresson Machin is a very important part of the story, though I can only sketch it here. I would refer you to an interesting article in the Anniversary volume, Pressing Toward the Mark. a collection of essays published in 1986. And the late Greg Bonson wrote an article called Machen, Van Til, and the Apologetic Tradition of the OPC. And he really gets into the weeds dealing with how it came about that Machen so wanted Van Til to become professor of apologetics at Westminster Seminary. I'm getting ahead of myself. Here, let me just mention a bit about the personal connection between these men. Van Til never actually took a course from Machen, who was a professor of New Testament at Princeton, but through Machen's writings, and particularly through his example, Van Til was influenced in a profound way by Machen's testimony and by his theological convictions. In 1921, the year before Van Til entered Princeton Seminary, Machen had published his book, The Origin of Paul's Religion, a classic defense of the traditional view of Paul's theology, and that had established Machen's reputation as an able defender of the historic Christian faith. During his years at Princeton, Van Til came under the strong academic and personal influence of Machin. They lived on the same floor of Alexander Hall. Perhaps you know, Machin was a lifelong bachelor, and he often roomed in the dormitory with the students, and that's how they first became acquainted. This was a period of growing ecclesiastical conflict within the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America. Machen published his influential book, Christianity and Liberalism, in 1923, in which he argued that liberalism was no mere version of Christianity, but in fact an alien religion. Machen also, on occasion during this period, filled the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, where he uncompromisingly proclaimed and defended the Reformed faith before students and the broader community. Machen became, for the younger Van Til, an exemplary champion of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. During this time, Van Tiltoo was beginning to flex his own apologetic muscles. He wrote a prize-winning paper in 1923 entitled, Evil and Theodicy, Justifying the Ways of God to Man. And then in the next year, 1924, he wrote another paper entitled, The Will and Its Theological Relations. In 1927, the year he took his doctorate from Princeton Seminary, the Princeton Theological Review, the publication of the seminary, printed an article by Van Til discussing Alfred North Whitehead's book, Religion in the Making. According to Bonson, this review already clearly exhibits those lines of thought for which Van Til's presuppositional analysis has come to be recognized throughout the years. As I mentioned, on the broader stage there was growing conflict, theological and ecclesiastical, within Presbyterianism in the Presbyterian Church in the USA. Again, I need to say something about that background. It will be more familiar to those of you who know your OPC history, but just a sketch for those who have forgotten or never heard it to set a context for Van Til's development. Toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, the PCUSA Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which was the northern branch of the Presbyterian Church after the division of the Civil War, was deliberately broadening its horizons, both theologically and geographically. There were revisions to the doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian Church, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and larger and shorter catechisms. In particular, in 1903, in order to accommodate a reunification with the Presbyterian Church of PCUSA and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, there were amendments to the Westminster Confession, which many at that time thought watered down its distinctively Reformed convictions. Further, there were inroads being made in the Church by critical modernism coming in from Europe. In general, the authority and reliability of the Scriptures were challenged by skeptical scholarship, and in particular, attacks were leveled against the five fundamental doctrines, the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of Jesus, His bodily resurrection and his supernatural miracles. Historically, these doctrines had been held as non-negotiable in the Presbyterian Church in the USA. All are affirmed in the Westminster Standards. But under pressure, and under pressure from conservatives in the church, these fundamentals were formally reaffirmed by the General Assembly in 1910, 1916, and 1923. The idea of fundamentalist, in part, stems from the commitment to these controversial, or doctrines that had become controversial. You might wonder why such a declaration was needed. At the time, others were asking the same question. Since it's in the Confession, why does it need to be reaffirmed? Well, it was because there were men entering the ministry in the PCUSA who no longer believed those things or thought those ideas were optional interpretations, even though they took vows to submit to the doctrinal standards, the Westminster standards in the church. In 1924, a reaction to the fundamental affirmations came, and it was called the Auburn Affirmation. This had its own infamous anniversary last year. And really, it wasn't an affirmation at all. You could call it a disaffirmation. Because the men who signed that document claimed that those five fundamentals were not necessarily truths that men ought to believe if they were to enter the gospel ministry in the PCUSA. That document was signed by 1,200 officers in the PCUSA. In the meantime, in 1932 and 1933, the PCUSA commissioned a group to travel to foreign mission fields supported by the Church to investigate the conduct of foreign missions by the Presbyterian Church and make recommendations for improvements. As a result, a book was published in 1933 entitled Rethinking Missions, a document which downplayed the uniqueness of Christianity as a revealed and redemptive religion, and saw it rather as, perhaps, the highest development of man's religious consciousness, but a tradition that could well be enriched by the teaching of other religions. Thus the report took a syncretistic view that we can blend what is best in Christianity with what is best in other religions as well and come up with a further evolution of man's spirituality. And of course that tendency has continued on since 1924. Well, that was all that Machen could stand. So he published in that same year a pamphlet entitled Modernism and the Board of Foreign Missions. Further, in 1933, he and other concerned members of the PCUSA formed an independent board for Presbyterian foreign missionaries. This board began to commission and send out Presbyterian missionaries who actually believed the gospel as expressed in the Reformed Confessions, who actually preached Christ as the only Redeemer of God's elect. Well, for his trouble, Machen and others were put on trial in the church in 1934 and 35, He was accused of being unsubmissive to the brethren, a violation of his ordination vows. He was accused of disobeying the Constitution of the church by failing to support the boards and agencies of the church. Machen had refused, you see, to sever his relationship with the independent board when commanded to do so by church authorities. He was accused of disturbing the peace of the church. Ultimately, following a process that was nothing less than a show trial with a foregone conclusion, he was not allowed, for example, to appeal to Scripture or the Reformed confessions in his defense. Machen was convicted on those charges. They were subsequently sustained by the General Assembly on appeal, and he was deposed from ministry in the PCUSA. As a result of his trial and deposition, a new church was formed. He and other ministers formed what was later called the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on June 11, 1936. Thirty-four ministers, seventeen ruling elders, and seventy-nine laymen became charter members of the new church. Their purpose was to continue the historic testimony of biblical Presbyterianism. They didn't see themselves as starting a new denomination so much as preserving the old one, which was increasingly defecting from the faith. Well, against that background, now we'll insert Van Til back into the storyline. Jumping back a moment, 1927, Van Til received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. In June of that year, he was received into the ministry of the Christian Reformed Church, the denomination that his family had belonged to since coming to the United States. It was required in that denomination that a man wait six months before he was eligible for a pastoral call. And so, during that time, Van Til took the opportunity to make a quick trip to Holland while he awaited a call from a local church. While he was in Holland, he was contacted with a call from an urban congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but he declined that call. Later he received a call from a Christian Reformed congregation in Spring Lake, a small rural town in Michigan. That call he decided to accept. And after visiting a few other European cities, he made his way back to the United States to take up that pastoral charge. Again, that's 1927. Then again, everything changed. 1928, Van Til accepted an invitation from Princeton Seminary to serve as an instructor in apologetics, an appointment which Machen applauded. Indeed, Machen had recommended Van Til for that position. Machen himself, the year before, had been appointed to that chair in apologetics. He had accepted that appointment, but then with the controversy in the church and the reorganization of Princeton Seminary, which is another sidebar story, he declined to take that chair and recommended Van Til in his place. That was June of 1928. And so the board nominated and appointed Van Til to that position in the seminary. It was a lectureship. After one year, the board wanted to make Van Til a full professor, which is pretty astonishing, a great testimony to his gifts. That offer was made in the spring of 1929. Machen again applauded the choice, but only weeks later, sadly, the General Assembly voted 530 to 300 to adopt the plan for the reorganization of the seminary and old Princeton, as Machen saw it, was no more. As a consequence of that action by the General Assembly, Machen resigned from Princeton Seminary in June of 1929. As did Van Til, Robert Dick Wilson, and Oswald T. Alice. Machen had plans for the establishment of a new seminary, one which would be called Westminster in Philadelphia. Machen knew the critical importance of apologetics to the training of ministers for the propagation and the scholarly defense of the Christian religion. He wanted Van Til for his main man in apologetics. Again, details in the Bonson article I mentioned earlier. As a matter of fact, Van Til was Machen's first and only choice for that position. But choosing him and getting him to serve were not the same thing. By this time, Van Til had taken up his pastoral charge in Spring Lake. He had taken leave for a year to teach at Princeton, but now he'd gone back again to his pastoral work and was loath to leave that church to take up a teaching position. So after he first declined Machen's invitation, O.T. Alice was dispatched from Philadelphia to Michigan to ask Van Til in person to take the seminary position. But again, Van Til refused. Finally, in August, the month before classes were to begin, Machen himself, along with Ned B. Stonehouse, went to Spring Lake to plead with Van Til to reconsider. As Van Til looked back on it, he said he felt something like the young Calvin when William Ferrell caught him leaving Geneva and said, in effect, if you don't stay here and continue the work of Reformation, may God curse you and your books. Well, here it wasn't staying in Geneva, but rather going to Westminster to teach. But even Mason was turned away with no assurance that Van Til would reconsider. And we don't know what happened in Van Til's heart and mind between August and September as he prayed and reflected and talked with his wife. But in September, despite his great trepidation, Van Til joined the faculty of seven and the student body of 50 students for the first term at Westminster Seminary. So in that way began a fruitful ministry of apologetics instruction and writing that was to last for over half a century. Machen and Van Till labored side by side for the next several years until Machen's death on New Year's Day in 1937. Thereafter, the mantle of the great Presbyterian defender of the faith fell upon the shoulders of the young Dr. Cornelius Van Till. At the same time, Van Til decided to change his affiliation, having watched the death throes of historic Presbyterianism in the P.C. U.S.A. from the sidelines. Remember, he was a member of the Christian Reformed Church, a solid, committed Reformed denomination with roots in the Netherlands. As he thought about it, He realized that there was a tradition in the CRC. There were gifted men. There were many pastors. On the other hand, there was this budding seminary with almost no... I mean, they had a historical tradition behind them, but they were shorthanded. And as Van Til weighed the security, if you will, not financial security, but the personal security of the familiar Christian Reformed Church. And now this budding denomination and seminary, he decided to align himself with the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serve there. And he wasn't alone. R.B. Kuyper, who also taught at Westminster moved his ministerial credentials from the CRC to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church at the same time. Many hoped that Van Til would become the ecclesiastical successor of Machen as well. It's really hard to overestimate the significance within that movement of Machen himself. And then when he died, humanly speaking, prematurely, it was like the head was cut off, this new movement, and who would step in it? But Van Til recognized that he wasn't the sort of churchman that Machen was, and so he resisted being ushered into that role. Now he had a behind-the-scenes role, mostly through training ministers in the OPC for the next several decades, but he didn't carry the torch within the denomination, within the new church, as Machen had done. So again, as Frame points out, Van Til was in some ways the consolidator of Machen's Reformation, and yet he didn't step into Machen's shoes as a churchman on the front lines of the battle for the faithfulness to the Reformed faith. But he was drawn into controversy indirectly, and there were two in particular, and I'm not sure how we're doing for time here. I may not get to both of them. Many of you who know OPC history will have heard of the Clark controversy. Without going into the details, that was an interesting story. Again, that Anna Rosary volume, Pressing Toward the Mark, talks about kind of the, you know, no church controversy is purely theological. sometimes they're not even remotely theological, but there are other things going on. And so the Clark controversy was sort of the tip of the iceberg with a bigger struggle within the church over the identity and therefore the future of the OPC. Was it going to rejoin the family of evangelical churches in a kind of a leadership position like the old PCUSA had been, or was it going to risk increased isolation by remaining faithful to a robust Reformed theology and practice. And that was part of the controversy. The point of debate had to do with epistemology. Clark and Van Til disagreed in their understanding of the incomprehensibility of God. There was a certain amount of talking back and forth in that. There were also questions about the some of the other doctrines that the free offer of the gospel in light of divine sovereignty and so on so forth. I'm collapsing things here very quickly in the interest of time. Those who opposed, I should also say, so who was the point man in the church for the opposition to Gordon Clark? It was not Cornelius Van Til, it was John Murray. And he was the one that was on the study committees and so forth, but certainly he was reflecting and probably Van Til had something to do with the formulations that were used in opposition to Clark. Long story short, Clark was never condemned for his views, but the fact that he was so challenged, he and many who supported him left the OPC at the conclusion of the controversy, and at least to the relief of many, the OPC maintained its thoroughgoing and distinctively reformed flavor. Now, in the years since, there have been ongoing conversations about where does the OPC fit within the broader evangelical world? Are we just going to be a stone in everyone's shoe until Judgment Day? Or can we get along, and different ministers and different churches, even different presbyteries, have had different opinions on that whole matter of identity and vision for the broader church. One of my dear friends in seminary who has since gone to be with the Lord, Charlie Dennison, who was the historian for the OPC for a number of years, he really celebrates the fact that the OPC has continued to move, not intentionally, but as a consequence more and more in a kind of an isolated direction, and of course as evangelicalism gets less and less evangelical, it makes more sense not to be mainstream. This is just an interesting sidelight. So one of the major supporters of Clark and opponents of Van Till had put forth what he called a program of action in 1944. And these are the four points. Point number one, so these are actions, these are to-do lists, right? Number one, ordain Gordon Clark. Number two, join the American Council of Christian Churches, a broader evangelical interdenominational group. Three, propound official Deliverances against the use of alcoholic beverages. Yes, beer was a debate. And finally, that the denomination should gain control over Westminster Seminary and the Presbyterian Guardian, which was sort of the publication organ of the conservatives in those days. There were many who didn't like the fact that The faculty at Westminster had what they considered to be an outsized influence, not just personally, but they were the ones that were shaping and training the pastors in the future. And they especially didn't care for the alien influence. Where do we heard that before? Alien influence in the seminary, by which they meant Murray, the Scotsman, and Van Til and Kuiper, the Dutchman. You've got to watch those aliens. They sneak in everywhere and they're dangerous. All right. The second big controversy, I'm not going to make the time limit, so much less questions, but I'm answering all the questions in the lecture, you see, so you won't have any questions left. I've called this the unmasking of Karl Barth. Karl Barth was a Swiss theologian. In 1919, he published a commentary on Romans in Europe that fell like a bombshell. That's the language that's used by many different commentators on Barth's early career. Barth repudiated or claimed to repudiate old liberalism. And he wanted to get back to the Reformation. So his movement was called Neo-Orthodoxy. That is a new attempt to reproduce the orthodoxy of the Reformation. And he used a lot of Reformational language from Luther and Calvin and others. And when he began to influence things in the United States, there were many who really applauded this as a reversion to conservatism. Here's a guy on our side, you know, sort of like in the 70s, every time a rock star claimed to have been born again, all the Christians went, yay, now we got a rock star! Well, now we have a theologian, a respected European theologian, who is on our side. But Van Til was reading Barthes very, very carefully, and he said, no, no, this is not Neo-Orthodoxy, this is Neo-Modernism. And his first book was The New Modernism. Later on he wrote a book called Christianity and Barthianism, where he intentionally reflects the title of Machen's book, Christianity and Liberalism, Christianity and Barthianism, and in both cases, and Van Til is very explicit about applying what Machen was saying, these are not two versions of Christianity. These are two alien religions because Barth did not reject any of the fundamental presuppositions of the old modernism while holding on to them. And with some very elaborate theologizing going on, he was able to wed them with the language of the Reformation and promote what was really a different religion. And Van Til not only took flack from devoted Barthians, but there were many evangelicals or semi-evangelicals in the United States that criticized Van Til for being too hard on Barth. But Van Til had the penetration and so he, I mean I think Bart's influence was still very, very great in America, but at least there was one voice crying in the wilderness that this is not the way to go, not to go the way of neo-orthodoxy. And by the time you get to 1964 and the new confession of faith that was drafted by the PCUSA, when Van Til wrote about that new confession, he was saying, here's the triumph of Bardianism, of neo-orthodoxy in the Presbyterian Church of the USA. So they went from old modernism to new modernism, and then of course it unraveled even more from there. I've got a couple of lengthy quotations from Van Til, which we'll be happy to read. But he said, Bardianism, though using the language of Reformation theology, is still only a higher humanism. That's the bottom line. Alright, let me just say a word or two. I'll just call this last little bit here, Van Til, up close and personal. As I say, I had him as a professor. Brian, you had him, right? You went to Westminster? I missed him. Oh, you missed him. But I knew he was hurting. Okay, alright. But you didn't have him in class. So I am the last man standing. Here, I had no philosophical training. I was an English major. I had no intention to be a minister, so I probably was only half paying attention to the classes that I was taking. But I was satisfying my friend, Greg Bonson, because I was sitting under the ministry of Cornelius Van Til. And thankfully, I learned more than I thought I did. It's interesting, John Frame, who was also one of his students before he was one of Van Til's colleagues, has this to say about his pedagogy. Van Til never took long to impress his students with the brilliance of his mind and his encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and theology. As to his communication skills, perhaps the jury is still out. Now notice this, his preaching, Vance Hill's preaching was very eloquent and challenging, and that's true even if you read them in print, the God of Hope, just very engaging as a preacher. But in some ways his preaching was better than his lecturing. His teaching method was to assign his students reading in some basic written lectures which were published mimeograph form, remember that, as unpublished syllabi, and then his conduct in class would be mostly discussion, punctuated by ad hoc lectures on various topics that came up. The discussion proceeded very fast, it seemed, considering that many of the students had no philosophical and little theological background. That was me. So I was sort of hoarding on for dear life. And truth be told, I thought, this guy's getting old. He's off his game, says the 20-year-old. But that's okay. He's said some good things and he's got some nice illustrations and he's funny sometimes. But he's awful repetitious. And until I sat down to study for my first big exam, And I'm looking at my notes and I'm thinking, you know, I don't have to cram to study this stuff. He has said it in one way or another from one angle or another. He has repeated and repeated. So it's actually stuck in my head. The basic contours, lots of names and lots of details. But this idea of defending the faith in terms of the whole Bible for the whole of life centered upon the self-attesting Christ, that came through loud and clear over and over and over again. And then I got second-hand Vantill from all of the other professors who had been trained by Vantill, and they're teaching their own seminary discipline from that same angle. So he may not have been You know, but I have seen, you've probably seen some academic lecturers that are just as boring as can be. Whatever Van Til's faults, he was not boring. He'd come into class, first act, he'd walk up and he'd erase whatever was on the blackboard, the green board, because he was going to need the whole thing. And in the course of lecturing, he would write something on the board and something else. So it looked like a graffitied wall by the end of the hour. Next day, he'd come in and start all over again. And if he had a special number of ideas, he'd have to erase part of his own graffiti and start another one. So again, there's a portrait of Van Til that tries to reproduce some of that stuff that was on the blackboard. He found a way to get information across the students. And he used to use the illustration, he said, some of you are giraffes and some of you are bunnies. The giraffes like to eat the leaves that are at the very, very tippy, tippy, tip top of the tree. And the bunnies like to eat the grass that's around the base of the tree. And he said, my job is to have something for you that are giraffes and something for you that are bunnies. Again, I'm the bunny at the bottom. And he would communicate that way in such an effective way. You know, the rap is that Van Til is hard to read. I think that's more a problem with the reader than the writer. He did require a certain amount of vocabulary. And depending, like many writers, depending on who he anticipated his audience to be, you know, C.S. Lewis was the kind of scholar that could write for scholars and he could write for the man on the street. Everybody quotes what he wrote for the man on the street. Not because what he wrote for scholars was incomprehensible, it's just that's not the audience. That's not where most of us live. And if you've read Why I Believe in God, that little pamphlet, there's nothing more engaging. You can hear Van Til's voice and sense his heart in that. He was just a wonderful man. He would preach in chapel from time to time. You know, I remember him talking about Noah, when Noah was preaching righteousness for 125 years, where the ark was being built. And then he said, and Satan... Oh no, that was a different sermon. When the men came and dropped the paralytic man down, Mark 2, for Jesus to heal. And then he said, and Satan, who was sitting in the rafters, said, And he would develop these little dialogues as part of his exposition. Now, again, that was preaching. But by the time I saw Van Til, I don't think the line between lecturing and preaching was so distinct anymore. Probably in his young, vigorous days, he would have been perhaps harder to follow. He came in one day with a smudge of dirt on his nose. and he apologized for being late but he tended to take constitutionals around the seminary grounds and down on the edge of the property at one point there were some workers who had dug a trench and they were laying I don't know if it was sewer pipe or electronic electrical cables or something and and Vin Till had stopped and greeted them and asked them what they were doing and they invited him to come down and have a closer look. So he climbed down into the into the trench and was talking with these men. And then he had to scramble out and rush off to class to talk to us. He was that personable. There was a retirement home for retired priests and nuns in his neighborhood. He would go and visit on a Sunday afternoon, these priests and nuns, and try to share the gospel with them. He even wrote a personal letter sharing the gospel with President Harry Truman when Truman was dying, and known to be dying. He was an evangelist who also then knew how to defend the faith. And while it can be very, very, very technical, I think Van Til's apologetics works very, very well for bunnies like me who ended up in the pastorate who need to present and defend the faith to just ordinary folk who want to know, what about the Bible? And what about this Christ? But it was all rooted in that deep commitment and knowledge of the whole Word of God. Well, I have to close. John Frame says he believes that Van Til is perhaps the most important Christian thinker since Calvin. That statement, Frame says, coming from a not uncritical disciple, because Frame does have criticisms of Vantill, but their criticism of a friend, the faithful wounds of a friend, rather than skeptics who want to just denounce Vantill's apologetic system as nonsense. And he does that by comparing Vantill with Immanuel Kant. Now again, the name is not so important. Kant made modern philosophy more and more the term, don't choke on it yet, epistemologically self-conscious. We all know things, but somewhere along the line we have to ask questions about how do we know what we know and how does that affect the certainty of the things that we know. And so debating over, it's sort of like, you know, we have glasses, some of us, and you're always looking through your glasses and you're seeing things. But if you get a scratch or a bad smudge on your glasses, now you've got to talk about glasses and whether or not they work well. Well, we're always thinking about things, we're always claiming to know things, we're always explaining things to one another, but it takes a philosopher to say, how do you know? What do you know? Kant, for all that he did, and again, this is an oversimplification but not a falsification, said that ultimately it is the man, the woman, themselves that determine what we know and its certainty and its validity. So for Van Til, Kant finally taught moderns about human autonomy, that man is a law unto himself, not only in his behavior, that's played out a lot since in the last 50, 60 years, but in his thinking. And for Frame, Van Til did the same thing for Christians. Make us epistemologically self-conscious. Why do we believe what we believe in the Christian faith? It is because of our Lord Jesus Christ, who speaks by His Spirit through every word written in Scripture. And because we know Him as Creator and Redeemer, and we can read and study and ingest His Word, then we can be confident, even about things that we couldn't possibly know in any other way. I talk about special revelation tomorrow morning. And so if Kant made modern people consistently independent of God. Van Til taught the modern church that you must be consistently, absolutely dependent upon God and His revelation. And any attempt to tinker with that confidence in the name of building bridges to unbelief or accommodating unbelief is just wrong-headed, and we shouldn't go that way. Bansheol's apologetic system is impressive, even overwhelming in some ways, and its biblical faithfulness, its theoretical profundity, its practical usefulness are perhaps even more impressive still when viewed in the light of this little sketch of the man and his ministry. From infancy, like Timothy, Bantill knew the Holy Scriptures, which were able to make him wise unto salvation. And because he believed that all Scripture was breathed out by God, then he could give us confidence that we really can use it to teach, and to rebuke, and to correct, and to train ourselves and others in righteousness. so that we might all be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. But at the heart of it is Jesus Christ, the self-attesting Christ of Scripture. Lord, we thank you for your servant and for the way in which, for many of us, he's made that crystal clear. And we pray, O Lord, that as his influence continues among ministers and others in the church, not just the OPC, but probably primarily the OPC, but other Napark churches that have been influenced and maybe beyond. We pray that more and more, particularly in this day, Lord, when people who claim to know you have less and less confidence in the Bible and in the Savior, that we would have more confidence And I do pray for the parents here who are raising young children in their homes and have heard now how that impacted Van Til's life. And we know it's your spirit that plants the seed, waters the seed, and brings the fruit. But we pray that we would have confidence to bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord in our homes, in our homeschooling, or in our Christian schoolwork, so that in every way our children will come to think your thoughts after you and bring every thought captive to the Lordship of our blessed Savior Jesus, in whose name we pray. Amen.