Originally posted by Paul manata
of course if you don't mind reading people that constantly misrepresent, or show a misunderstanding, of their opponants.... then recommend away
I thought you were a bit harsh on Nash...until last night. I've been burning the Nash lectures (in Quicktime format) from the Christian Apologetics course to CD, and then encoding the CD into WMA vbr to transfer to my portable MP3 player and keep on my extra hard disk. So in the process of doing that, I decided to listen to the "Methodology" lecture from the Christian Apologetics course which I had not listened to in some time, not since becomming a hardcore Van Tillian presuppositonalist. Nash said the following;
"...because I think, there isn't a whole lot of difference, between Gordon Clark and Corneilus Van Til...."
"...on this particular point, there is little if any difference between Gordon Clark in his latter years and many of Van Til's disciples, not necessarily those on our present facuilty, but people like Greg Bahnsen, Gary North, the whole group of...Theonomists, yeah you mouthed the words too, this is a group that's really splittin' up the Church,..."
"...but Gary North holds to a system of economics, that is almost identical with mine, in case you care alright."
"Gordon Clark believes that the laws of logic, are necessary and essential laws, without which, sound Theology and sound Philosophy are impossible. On the other hand, Van Til taught, or so I think, you gotta understand, they're are alot of ambiguities in Van Til, but Van Til taught, that God created the laws of logic. Now I know that's a controversial statement, and I don't know whether John Frame, would agree with that, but I do know that alot of Van Tillians, do think that's what Van Til meant."
Talk about poisoning the well...I mean misrepresenting. That's not what Van Til taught, neither have I heard such a thought come from a Van Tillian.
When I heard that I thought, "whoa, that doesn't sound right!" So I did a little searching and did a little reading from:
http://www.vantil.info/articles/vtfem.html
http://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/th/TH.h.Pratt.VanTil.1.html
http://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/th/TH.h.Pratt.VanTil.2.html
Van Til say's;
"œChristian theism should employ the law of contradiction, whether positively or negatively, as a means by which to systematize the facts of revelation. Whether these facts are found in the universe at large or in the Scripture.
The law of contradiction cannot be thought of as operating anywhere except against the background of the nature of God" (IST 11).
and
"œIt appears that there must seem to be contradiction in human knowledge. To this we must now add that the contradiction that seems to be there can in the nature of the case be no more than a seeming contradiction.
If we said that there is real contradiction in our knowledge we would once more be denying the basic concept of Christian-theism, i.e., the concept of the self-complete universal in God. We should then not merely be saying that there is no complete coherence in our thinking but we should also be saying that there is no complete coherence in God´s thinking. And this would be the same as saying that there is no coherence or truth in our thinking at all. If we say that the idea of paradox or antinomy is that of real contradiction, we have destroyed all human and all divine knowledge; if we say that the idea of paradox or antinomy is that of seeming contradiction we have saved God´s knowledge and therewith also our own" (DOF 62).
and
"œ
As Christians we say that this is a mystery that is beyond our comprehension. It surely is. God himself, in the totality of his existence, is above our comprehension. At the same time, this mysterious God is mysterious because he is, within himself, wholly rational" (IST 230).
Either Nash's bias came through in his lecture, and or Nash learned more about Van Til through reading Clark than through reading Van Til, and or his misunderstanding is due to a lack of not paying close enough attention to Van Til when reading his books.
