Today in Church History: Cornelius Van Til
On May 3, 1895, Cornelius Van Til was born in Grootegast, Groningen, the Netherlands.
After immigrating to the United States with his family in 1905, Van Til studied at Calvin College and Seminary before enrolling at Princeton Seminary, where he studied under Geerhardus Vos, C. W. Hodge, and Robert Dick Wilson. In 1927 he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. Following a brief pastorate in the Christian Reformed Church, Van Til became a member of the original faculty at Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929, teaching apologetics until his retirement in 1972. In 1936, he transferred his ministerial membership into the newly-formed Orthodox Presbyterian Church where he remained throughout his life, declining several invitations to return to Calvin Seminary and the CRC.
In all of his work Van Til consistently championed the apologetic approach of presuppositionalism. "The issue between believers and non-believers in Christian theism cannot be settled by a direct appeal to 'facts' or 'laws' whose nature and significance is already agreed upon by both parties to the debate," he wrote. Van Til vigorously challenged traditional approaches to apologetics, both Catholic and evangelical, because they conceded too much to non-Christian ways of thinking and denied God as the ultimate judge of reality. In works such as The New Modernism (1946), he also warned against the seductive teachings of Karl Barth and the emerging neo-orthodox movement.
Labels: History
posted by The Catechizer and The Deacon | 5:44 AM
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