# FV, Trinity and Van Til



## py3ak (Oct 5, 2006)

Ralph Smith thinks Van Til supports his views. 

One page, giving documentation supplementary to another article is found in this article.

A quote from Van Til provided in it:


> Covenant theology sprang up naturally as the most consistent expression of Calvinism, in which the idea of the self-sufficient, ontological Trinity is the final reference point in all predication. It is this idea that lies at the center of covenant theology. The three persons of the Trinity have exhaustively personal relationship with one another. And the idea of exhaustive personal relationship is the idea of the covenant. (emphasis added)



Any thoughts?


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## tewilder (Oct 5, 2006)

Ralph Smith has two books on this (plus a third more popular one) published by Doug Wilson's press.

In the books Smith admits to breaking with the whole Western tradition of thinking about the Trinity (so the FV is not on not Reformed, it is not even Western theology), but claims to find some antecedents in Kuyper and more in Van Til.

Well, What to make of this?

In fact, the (then) Christian Reformed minister Henry Danhof had pretty much the same ideas in 1919. 

http://www.prca.org/prtj/nov97.html#IdeaCovenantGrace
http://www.prca.org/prtj/apr98.html#CovenantOfGrace

So we find that this thinking about covenant and Trinity is fairly old in Dutch-American theology. It certainly pre-dates Van Til. Did it come from a common source, perhaps Danhof? Or are all these guys working out the implications of certain tendencies in Dutch theological thinking? It this perhaps the legacy of the deficiencies of Dutch neo-calvinism?


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## py3ak (Oct 5, 2006)

OK. Here is something Ligon Duncan said. Differences? Similarities?



> Covenant theology flows from the trinitarian life and work of God. God’s covenant communion with us is modeled on and a reflection of the intra-trinitarian relationships. The shared life, the fellowship of the persons of the Holy Trinity, what theologians call perichoresis or circumincessio, is the archetype of the relationship the gracious covenant God shares with His elect and redeemed people. God’s commitments in the eternal covenant of redemptive find space-time realization in the covenant of grace.




From- http://www.fpcjackson.org/resources/apologetics/Covenant Theology & Justification/ligoncovt.htm


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## tewilder (Oct 6, 2006)

Well, Duncan seems to want to go beyond the economic Trinity, and that would be the key distinction. Just what the source of his ideas are, I can't say. 

He is a Southern Presbyterian; that is, he wants to internalize and pietize covenant theology to get rid of the public Kingdom dimension, which could be a factor here. (Historically the reason for this is so that the Church does not have to confront the public sins of the society, such as slavery, Jim Crow, and the like. They call this the "spirituality of church" meaning the irrelevance of Christianity to issues of justice.)

Since the critics of the Federal Vision that people pay attention to are generally either Klinites or Spirituality of the Church types, the discussion becomes rather distorted.

Another thing worth noting is that the FV has always been willing to make metaphysical speculations and deduce theology from these, even while making a big noise about being a Biblical theology movement. In that way they are the true children of Van Til.

[Edited on 10-6-2006 by tewilder]

[Edited on 10-6-2006 by tewilder]


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## py3ak (Oct 6, 2006)

Any Van Tillians care to show why the FV are not their logical children? And no, it is not enough that some Van Tillians attack them. I would assume that Van Tillians can also be inconsistent -indeed, if the FV are Van Tillian and yet are not his heirs they must be.

I am guessing, Mr. Wilder, that you are not either Klinean or a Spiritual of the Church type. You have also connected FV with the Dutch. Are you then an Old Princetonian? Or how would you characterize your spot in the theological spectrum?


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## Magma2 (Oct 6, 2006)

> _Originally posted by py3ak_
> Any Van Tillians care to show why the FV are not their logical children? And no, it is not enough that some Van Tillians attack them.



Just an aside, their opposition is as inconsistent and contradictory as their theology. Check out the current issue of Van Tilian Morecraft’s “The Counsel of Chalcedon” where they gave their cover story to Richard Gaffin Jr. Van Tilians stick together regardless of where their paradoxical, heretical -- did I say irrational -- teachings might lead. Our own Van Tilian Dr. R. S. Clark will tell you there is no logical connection whatsoever. Of course, the use of logic in light of the Scriptures -- even in opposition to rank heresy -- is nothing but rationalism, so what more can anyone expect?


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## py3ak (Oct 6, 2006)

Is Ligon Duncan a Van Tilian?


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## tewilder (Oct 6, 2006)

I don't connect the Federal Vision with all the Dutch. But if you take the worst ideas of Hoeksema, Danhof, and Heyns and add big dose of Kline you have the Federal Vision. All three Dutch guys were in the Christian Reformed Church initially. Danhof gave the 1919 lecture I referenced above in Grand Rapids, Heyns taught at Calvin Seminary in Grand Rapids, and Hoeksema was a pastor there. So we are talking about a fairly narrow group of people in the Kuyper tradition. Grand Rapids was something of a narrow backwater. Vos was run out of there by the militant infralapsarians. There tended to be a lot of action and reaction. 

The same ideas keep popping up in various combinations among the North American Dutch either as Kyperianism or people reacting against it (Hoeksema, Danhof and the Canadians). The main thing left for the Federal Vision was to imbibe the Kline of type of Biblical theology of symbols, and also his example of successful and rewarded theological recklessness. 

We know that the Federal Vision founders studied Kline deeply and were enthusiastic promoters of his books. We know that they read Hoeksema, because they cite him. Danhof was only recently translated to English. Heyns was translated and published in English in 1926, but I have not seen a Federal Vision person cite him. 

So with Heyns and Danhof all we have is the knowlege that Federal Vision type ideas were being bandied around in the Dutch American Calvinist Kuyperian tradition almost 90 years ago, not that that are direct FV sources. None of those guys held to all the ideas the the FV combines. Hoeksema and Danhof were a team fighting Heyns, and each side was capable of saying some very good things. 

The FV people are also influenced by the Mercersburg Theology, but I suspect they came to that when their ideas were fairly far along, and we attracted by the resemblences to what they already thought.

Norman Shepherd is another man educated in the Netherlands and big reader of Dutch sources.

This does not mean that I oppose Dutch theology pre-Kuyper, nor the northern American presbyterian theologians before the 20th century. Nor do you find me going after Bavinck with a hatchet like John Robbins does, in fact I am partly responsible for making some Bavinck stuff available in Spanish. (And also an article of Klines'. I am not opposed to _everything_ about him.) I like the English puritans minus their pietism, although I don't like the turn to volunterism from Ames on. I think this centrality of the will is a big source of what became decisionism in American evangelicalism. Also I would not agree with the church establishment ideas of these people, English, Dutch or New England. I am inclined to like the New England church polity, not the weirdness of Presbyterianism nor the high-annointed ideas of the continentals and their "domines". 

So I can't say I see some guru with all the truth. But I think that 20th century American theology was pretty much a wasteland.

[Edited on 10-6-2006 by tewilder]


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## py3ak (Oct 6, 2006)

That's very interesting, Mr. Wilder. Where would you put Van Til on the spectrum of influence?


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## tewilder (Oct 6, 2006)

> _Originally posted by py3ak_
> Is Lig Duncan a Van Tilian?



Probably not. He was educated in Edinbourgh, and his family seems to be associated with Sproul's Legonier outfit.


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## tewilder (Oct 6, 2006)

> _Originally posted by py3ak_
> That's very interesting, Mr. Wilder. Where would you put Van Til on the spectrum of influence?



Shepherd seems to be Vantillian, but at any rate Van Til was a Shepherdite, having jointly with Gaffin defended Shepherd to the Westminster faculty on the basis of the supposed identity of faith and works.

All the early FV people were Vantillians. The Canadian Reformed defended similar views on church and Covenant in the face of their logical conflict with the Three Forms of Unity with an explicit appeal to Van Til's doctrine that truth is contradictory to human reason. 

Also Van Til and company were moving in the direction that the Federal Vision has gone. See Hoeksema's book, The Clark-Van Til Controversy, for a defense of the view that Van Til had taken up Arminian exigesis of Biblical passages to make his case for paradox in Scripture. There there is the Murray-Stonehouse-Van Til idea of God's two contrary wills.

Also, my former pastor, a direct protoge of Shepherd's, and a graduate of Westminster East, used to preach that the Westminster Confession was "logical and true" but not the Biblical way to think, and so we should not think after the manner of the Confession's theology. When I pressed him on this he defending himself by appealling to Van Til's doctrine that truth is contradictory. 

But, having said all that, we also have to notice that the Federal Vision is going further. Some people like Leithart became interested in deconstructionism. They took a liking for postmodernism. We used to hear about Van Til being "the first postmodernist", but now the FV people are more open about having to press on, and talk about the Wittegensteinization of Van Til, or otherwise going beyound where Van Til left off.

Also there is the case of younger Federal Vision people who were not educated in the Van Til seminaries but in university graduate schools and who got their postmodernism without having to go through a Val Til phase. These younger FV also differ in other respects. For example they love the ideas of Peter Enns to the effect that since Hebrew did not come into existence until the time of David or thereabouts, even the oldest books of the Bible could not have been written until much later than that. Such ideas appall Jordan (who thinks that Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew, and we have to learn Hebrew to get the God-created concepts and symbols). 

But frankly, I think there is a degree of irrationalism in Dutch-American theology that is older and wider than Van Til. It is habitual, for example, among the Christian Reformed people to talk of the illogicality of the Trinity. But for Van Til the Barth/Brunner debate seems to have been a very critical event which made him realize that there was something big there that he had to come to terms with, although in my view he never managed to do so. 

I asked Alvin Plantinga about this after I had heard him read his paper contrasting Barth and Bavinck on their use of reason. I asked him whether he was familiar with the ideas of Cornelius Van Til and he said yes. Then I asked him whether he would classify Van Til with Barth or Bavinck. Plantinga said "With Barth." I think he is exactly right about this.

But, we are almost to the point where the FV could drop their allegiance to Van Til and still go on with the help of N.T. Wright, Wittgenstein or some other figure that they find attractive.


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## tewilder (Oct 7, 2006)

And, just to get it on the record, we still have not talked about the influence of Schilder, or of the role of two, contrary covenant concepts in the Federal Vision that they apply to different matters, namely a Schilder-Heyns sort of idea and a Danhof-Smith sort of idea. There is no way to deal with Schilder without getting very complicated, particularly since there are influences or similarities to the FV from people who were the great opponants of each other in their own day. The bottom line is that the more I learn the less novel the FV seems in its various ideas, but they sure put together a different combination of these old ideas.


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## py3ak (Oct 7, 2006)

I received a private communication indicating that Ligon Duncan is not Van Tillian, so it seems your suspicion was correct.

Where Van Til's influence is present, then, it is with regard to paradox in theology.


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