{"id":1707,"date":"2010-08-01T22:31:34","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T06:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/08\/01\/van-til-not-a-fundamentalist\/"},"modified":"2010-08-01T22:31:34","modified_gmt":"2010-08-02T06:31:34","slug":"van-til-not-a-fundamentalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/08\/01\/van-til-not-a-fundamentalist\/","title":{"rendered":"Van Til – not a fundamentalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the books I read this spring is Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman<\/em> by John R. Muether. My son gave me this book about a year or more ago and I decided it was high time I read it. This is the first biography of Van Til that I have read. A friend who also read it said that it was a good book to fill in some background that other books missed. He recommended reading some of the other books in addition to this one.<\/p>\n

While I will put this post in the \u2018book reviews\u2019 category, this article isn\u2019t really a book review. I do recommend this book and think it will be worth your while to read if you are interested in Van Til at all.<\/p>\n

One of the things that I learned from this book is that Van Til was definitely a separatist. But he wasn\u2019t your fundamentalist type of separatist. He had his own branch of separatism, making himself distinct from both evangelicalism and fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Van Til first made this distinction clear in a 1957 address to new students at Westminster Theological Seminary at the beginning of the school year, warning them \u201cof voices they would encounter who would challenge their confidence in the Word of God.\u201d ((Muether, p. 182.)) In May 1961, he gave an address called \u201cNew Evangelicalism\u201d to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church Ministerial Institute. \u201cThe result of this presentation was a seventy-five-page syllabus in which he observed that the fundamentalist-modernist battle had evolved into a neo-orthodox and neo-evangelical dialogue.\u201d ((Muether, p. 183.)) This work was never published, but Carl Henry wrote Van Til about it. Muether says he felt \u2018stung\u2019 by the criticisms.<\/p>\n

This sets up the quote that I want to highlight:<\/p>\n

\n

The goal behind Van Til\u2019s dissent was to highlight the distinctiveness of the Reformed faith that yielded not only a Reformed system of doctrine but also a Reformed doctrine of Scripture and a Reformed defense of the faith. These were of a whole cloth; they were not exchangeable features, and thus Van Til would accept no substitutes. Hence Van Til would not concede that separatism belonged to the fundamentalists<\/strong>. There was a Reformed separatism that was grounded in Kuyper\u2019s doctrine of the antithesis, and it was modeled courageously by Machen. ((Muether, pp. 186-187, emphasis mine.))<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Van Til viewed Fundamentalists as not separated enough. J. Gresham Machen, Van Til\u2019s mentor, likely saw things in the same way. Machen, we have been told, was not comfortable with the Fundamentalists of his day (he died in 1937). Some have suggested he thought the Fundamentalists were uncultured hicks. ((This may have been true of some. Certainly it is true of some today! But they are our<\/em> hicks!)) The book on Van Til doesn\u2019t make Machen\u2019s views entirely clear, but it seems that he saw the Fundamentalists as co-belligerents against the modernists, but also as being found wanting in terms of their theology and ecclesiology as well. Certainly this was Van Til\u2019s view.<\/p>\n

Notice also the emphasis on Reformed doctrine and Reformed apologetics. One thing this book makes clear is that Van Til was a champion of Reformed thinking. He likely would find many who claim to be his followers in apologetics to be thoroughly wanting, not being Reformed in their entire outlook.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the current trends of our day are heading in a similar direction with the revival of Reformed dogma seemingly everywhere. The most publicized movement in conservative Christianity today is the \u2018neo-Calvinist\u2019 movement. Van Til would probably not be entirely comfortable with it because it isn\u2019t thoroughly Reformed. But he would likely appreciate the spirit tending toward Reformed thinking that lies behind the neo-Calvinism.<\/p>\n

This neo-Calvinism is transcending evangelical and fundamentalist divides. I would say that it is behind the complete willingness of some to give the benefit of the doubt to the serious errors of neo-Calvinisms \u2018stars\u2019 because the new movement is centered on the Reformed theology (although not completely embracing every aspect of Reformed thought). The old paradigms that defined the divide between evangelicals and fundamentalists aren\u2019t working any more, at least for some, because the Reformed doctrine is the new paradigm, the new center. The old paradigms centered on opposition to or support for cooperative evangelism which itself was essentially a repudiation of the older paradigm of antagonism to modernism that defined conservative Christianity in opposition to liberalism.<\/p>\n

Why don\u2019t the old paradigms work anymore? I would suggest that it is because the \u2018Conservative Evangelicals\u2019 have largely repudiated the most egregious forms of cooperative evangelism. They haven\u2019t repudiated all<\/em> of the new evangelical philosophy, but one of the biggest of the divides between fundamentalism and the new evangelicalism was the issue of cooperative evangelism. This, coupled with a misplaced center on Reformed theology, is causing some to minimize the differences and promote a new movement centered on the new-Calvinism.<\/p>\n

The book on Van Til makes it clear why he didn\u2019t consider himself a fundamentalist (though he likely agreed with some of the issues Fundamentalism raised). His \u2018center of separation\u2019 was Reformed theology, not Christian Fundamentalism. I think we are seeing a similar thing repeated in the current movements of our day.<\/p>\n

\"don_sig2\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the books I read this spring is Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman by John R. Muether. My son gave me this book about a year or more ago and I decided it was high time I read it. This is the first biography of Van Til that I have read. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[31,105,37,77,44],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-rx","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}