Christian Civilization

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In the August 2019 issue of Ligonier Ministries’s magazine Tabletalk, Keith Mathison writes a lengthy essay titled “Christianity and Van Tillianism,” which is written from the perspective of Reformed Thomism in criticism of Cornelius Van Til’s apologetic program.   He has republished it in PDF format at academia.edu as well.  J.V. Fesko published a book earlier this year, which I reviewed here, which also criticizes Van Til from the position of Reformed Thomism.  Mathison makes many of the same arguments that Fesko and other Reformed Thomists, and more broadly, Protestant Thomists, have made against Van Til.  Mathison continues the legacy of R.C. Sproul, who founded Ligonier Ministries, in defending classical apologetics against Van Til’s presuppositional school.  Mathison begins with a gracious introduction in which he acknowledges that Van Til was a brother in Christ, was dealing with complex issues, that neither he nor Van Til or infallible, and that we should not become mindless cheerleaders for either side.  My comments here are offered in hopes of furthering a thoughtful discussion. Continue reading →

So what exactly is Van Til’s beef with Aquinas?  First, there is the issue of Aquinas’s claims about Aristotle contradicting the biblical teaching about man’s depravity.   That a pagan like Aristotle, who, according to the Bible, hates God, suppresses natural revelation about God, and worships idols rather than the true God (Rom. 1:18-32, 8:7; Col. 1:21; Eph. 4:18), would develop and promote a rigorous proof of the existence of the true God is something that should be unexpected, if not completely ruled out of the realm of possibility.  Second, Van Til argues that when Aristotle’s philosophy is closely examined, along with Aquinas’s use of that philosophy, we find teachings that are anti-Christian concerning the nature of God and the general nature of reality.  To explain this, let’s start with a statement by Aquinas on the issue:  “But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like. In fact, such truths about God have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of the natural reason.”[1]  Van Til argues that the oneness of God as conceived by Aristotle logically excludes the Christian God.  Aquinas has taken a superficial similarity between the oneness of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and the oneness of the biblical God and has failed to realize the contradiction between how each approach understands that oneness. Continue reading →

A group of crows is called a murder, a group of owls a parliament, and a group of geese a gaggle.  But what do you call a group of strawmen?  Reforming Apologetics by J.V. Fesko.  I commend the author for a large number of citations to the works of Cornelius Van Til, his main opponent in his defense of Thomistic apologetics; nevertheless, the author’s interactions with Van Til’s writings indicate that he searched for quotes in Van Til’s writings that seemed to support his case against Van Til, but he did not closely read the immediate context of the quotes, much less have a substantial grasp Van Til’s apologetic method as a whole.  One of Fesko’s main claims is that Van Til rejected “common notions” between Christians and non-Christians and other ideas related to God’s natural revelation, when in fact Van Til did not reject those ideas.  Fesko fails to grasp that Van Til only criticized a particular kind of appeal to common notions made by Aquinas.  The strawman argument that Van Til rejected common notions becomes the author’s basis for a factory production of other strawman arguments against Van Til, such as claiming that Van Til claimed that all knowledge comes from the Bible, claimed that all knowledge could be deduced from a single principle, denied a nature/grace distinction, and that Van Til’s argument for God’s existence does not address the correspondence of our ideas to the order of the natural world.  In this supposed refutation of Van Til in defense of Aquinas, Fesko never states Van Til’s actual argument against Aquinas.  Fesko also never states Van Til’s transcendental argument for the existence of God (TAG), not even in a rough outline form, so the book also fails as a general refutation of Van Til’s apologetic program. Continue reading →

A Review of Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition:  A Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008).

I recently read Edward Feser’s book, The Last Superstition, because someone who claimed to be a former Van Tilian said it was the book that converted him to Thomism.  Cornelius Van Til often criticized Aristotle, and criticized Aquinas for relying on Aristotle, and criticized Classical apologetics in general.  As the subtitle indicates, Feser’s book is directed at refuting atheism, not Van Til.  It should be no surprise, then, that Feser does not identify Van Til and respond to his criticisms of Aquinas.  My conclusion after reading the book is that Feser does not even incidentally provide a refutation of Van Til’s criticism of Aquinas.  Nevertheless, because there is a great deal of debate over what exactly Van Til found wrong with Aquinas, Feser’s book provides a convenient way to compare and contrast Thomistic apologetics with Van Til’s presuppositional approach to Christian apologetics. Continue reading →