Muether on Van Til: A Review (pt 2)

Part 1 of this review is here.

We live in late modernity, a post-Christian time when most of the culture is or seems to be hostile to the Christian faith. Thus, apologists are highly valued and most necessary. Cornelius Van Til He made a great and important contribution to the defense of the faith, chiefly by defending it in a way that is consistent with the faith itself. Many other approaches to defending the faith don’t really defend the Christian, Trinitarian faith. Other approaches attempt to defend Christianity by trying to make it seem reasonable or probable to modern autonomous man. Van Til defended Christianity come to its own. He defended the Reformed faith and he did it as a Christian. As simple as that sounds it was fairly revolutionary when he began to propose it.

This volume is interested in that revolution but it is just as interested in the apologist himself. There is a sort of mythos that surrounds Old Westminster and Old Princeton that works against telling the history of those places and people. Because of the aura that surrounds them it is easy to see them as saints but harder to see them as flesh and blood people. Perhaps the best thing about this volume is that Muether succeeds in humanizing Van Til.

He does that by deliberately setting Van Til not only in his social-historical context but by situating him in his ecclesiastical context. First the former. Van Til was not born in the USA. He was an immigrant raised who came to the USA and who had to learn English after he arrived. He was raised in, what is to many of us, a relatively unfamiliar world of cultural-linguistic isolation. In many ways he was raised in a pre-modern, pre-technical world. There probably wasn’t much difference between the immigrant community in which he grew up in Indiana and the Netherlands in which he was born.

Van Til not only adopted a new country, as it adopted him, but he also adopted a new church. Raised in the Christian Reformed Church, by virtue of his call to WTS, he became, as much as a Reformed Dutchman can, an American Presbyterian. Muether traces his roots to the Afscheiding (separating) of 1834 and the sense of alienation from the mainline that necessarily accompanied that separation. Van Til wasn’t raised in the mainline. That background and inherited memory of the suffering of his forebears was a sort of preparation for the the suffering that would be entailed by his identification with another separating body, the Orthodox Presbyterians.

Muether does a very good job of telling the story of Van Til’s adaptation of his mixed theological heritage: Kuyper, Bavinck, Vos, and Warfield. Just as he represented a synthesis of the Dutch Reformed and American Presbyterian church traditions, he also synthesized continental and American Reformed theology. Thus, though his groundbreaking work in apologetics should not be underplayed neither should it be overplayed. In many respects, CVT did not see himself as an innovator. He was the heir of streams of Reformed orthodoxy inherited by those four giants and mediated to Reformed theology around the turn of the 20th century.

Van Til was “ahead of the curve” in diagnosing the fundamental weakness of non-confessional evangelicalism. In the 1930s he was warning the Reformed community about the necessity of an antithesis not only with unbelief but also with revivalist evangelicalism. In the current discussions about what it is to be Reformed there is an adjective that well describes CVT that also should describe genuine Reformed theology, piety, and practice: confessinalism. Van Til was the original warrior children of Machen.

Some final thoughts. Though WTS (Phila) is a large institution today but for most of his career, WTS was a small to medium-sized school. That fact makes Van Til’s influence even more remarkable. He didn’t have the platform that he would have had at Princeton or some other institution. By leaving Princeton he faced potential obscurity. He also identified with a small denomination and to do so he had to walk away from his church. Today Van Til’s original church, the CRC is a little less than 10 times larger than the OPC. It’s also interesting to learn that CVT often struggled to write and to communicate in a way that could be understood by those who did not share his background. Van Til wasn’t a myth. This volume is a worthy introduction to a remarkably useful flesh-and-blood minister of God’s Word (VDM).

This volume is available at WSC Books for $17.36. Click on the image for more info.