# Van Til: A Christian Theory of Knowledge



## RamistThomist (Oct 10, 2017)

Some of this will be my own reflections on CvT's A Christian Theory of Knowledge and the rest will be towards a construction of anti-scale of being philosophy. I am not reviewing the whole book because it's unnecessary. Why do a review of any CvT work after Bahnsen's magnum opus? Further, the last 150 pages of CTK could have been left off and the book would have been better.

While CvT's critique of Romanism was good, he didn't integrate his earlier (and fine) critique of Plotinus, Augustine, and being/non-being into his larger critique of Romanism, which likely could have buried Romanism. Instead, he got sidetracked on showing how Karl Barth is secretly in line with the nouvelle theologie of post-Vatican II theology.

CvT gives a fairly good summary and critique of the early church fathers. There is some difficulty in this, since no one, even anchoretic traditions, are entirely clear on who constitutes (and when!) the ECFs. Even admitting Tertullian is a heretic, I don't think you will find many exceptions in the ancient world to the epistemology CvT is summarizing. 

CvT writes that the early church could not find a Christian view of freedom to coalesce with a Christian view of necessity, with the result the fathers opted for a nonbiblical view of free will.

_Non-Christian Continuity and Discontinuity_

A non-Christian view of continuity sees an identification of God and man, as seen below:

The higher on the scale, the more real and "true" the thing is. Van Til notes that Tertullian sees sin as "the opposite of good." This sounds correct until we realize that means sin is "lower" on the scale of good. Sin has "slenderness of being."

On the principle of continuity it is hard to see how Tertullian (and Justin)'s view of God is different from the Stoics'. But when he argues against Marcion, he says the Christian God is "Other" than man (107).

_Later Platonisms_

Moving to the fathers (Origen and Clement) we see the scale of being hardened in place. CvT quotes Plotinus to the effect, "thought is motion" and this is inferior to ecstasy. (Rowan Williams has a helpful summary on this point).

Here our chart is modified. God is now seen as hyper-ousia, above ousia. How does one then get from the highest point on the scale of being to "above being?" Mysticism, ecstasy. Van Til can then make the critique that many of these fathers employed both rationalism (scale of being, continuity principle) and irrationalism (ecstasy, mysticism). In fact, rationalism and irrationalism on this gloss are dialectically correlative.

If man is on the scale of being and participates in good, then consistently we must say he also participates in non-being.

_Is Finitude Evil?_

This is the key point: on metaphysical accounts man is defective because he is finite (he participates lower on the scale of being, even to participating in non-being. Biblical religion, by contrast, sees man's problem as ethical: he is in rebellion to God. CvT then gives a helpful discussion on "total depravity." We are not saying that man's noetic capacity is ruined. It is in rebellion. 

_A Metaphysical Fall from Oneness_

Augustine is very clear (City of God section on the Platonists) that One = Truth = Being. The further away from the One we get, the more irrational we get. The problem is that historical facts are in the realm of the many (further, since history is contingent). This is similar to Plato's problem of learning by experience. Van Til writes,

When Plato took his line and divided it sharply between eternal being of which there was genuine knowledge or science, and non-being of which there was no knowledge, he was faced with the question of how learning by experience is possible (129). 

Back to Augustine: Eternal Truth and History are dialectical opposites. If Christ is the Eternal Word (and true) then how could he be historical? If historical, then not eternal, and thus not true, and thus unknown. This is where one's onto-epistemology leads. As Van Til says, "The first option leads to truth without content."

Van Til has a nice phrase to summarize all of this: slenderness of being. (And that is where these traditions find man's free will).

Other notes:

Rejecting the Augstino-Platonic view of Time: sheer timeless (moving image of eternity) would swallow up all distinctions. 

Problems:

I almost understand what CvT means when he says pure rationality and pure irrationality demand one another (144). I wish he would have clarified it.

A hard read and while containing numerous brilliant insights, they are scattered over the place and one can't help but think of Gary North's summary of any Van Til book: 

His most effective critical arguments sound the same in every book. Randomly pick up a coverless Van Til book, and start reading; you may not be sure from the development of the arguments just what the book is about, or who it is intended to refute. His books all wind up talking about the same three dozen themes (_Dominion and Common Grace_, p. 10).


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