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.
