Justified True Belief

(●) The Dutch dairy farmer’s son who argued that nothing whatever can be proved unless God is presupposed first. + For most of the church’s history, a Christian who wanted to defend the faith began where his unbelieving neighbor stood. He would point to the order of the heavens, or the design of the eye, or the empty tomb, and reason forward from evidence both men could see. Cornelius Van Til spent forty-three years telling seminary students that this well-meant method gives away the argument in its opening sentence. His claim was that there is no patch of ground outside the question where the two of you can stand and weigh it. The unbeliever already uses, in the very act of arguing, a world he can only have on Christian terms: facts that stay put, laws of logic that hold, a mind he trusts to reach the truth. Take God away and none of that is accounted for. So the Christian should not argue that God probably exists. He should argue that unless God exists, arguing about anything is a performance with no floor under it. The name that stuck to this is presuppositional apologetics. Apologetics is just the old word for giving reasons for the faith, and a presupposition is simply the thing you are standing on before you begin, the assumption so basic that every one of your arguments already leans on it. Van Til was not a tidy writer and he knew it. He published reluctantly, mostly as class syllabi run off on a mimeograph machine and handed out in the room, and otherwise through one small Reformed press, so that for decades he was read more by his students than by the wider church. But his students went out and argued his way, and the odd, aggressive question they learned from him, "and on your view, how is it that you can reason at all?", is one a great many Christians now put to unbelief.

(●) 1895 AD: Born in a thatched farmhouse with the cow barn attached, the sixth son of a Groningen dairyman. + Cornelius Van Til was born on 3 May 1895 in Grootegast, a village in the northern Dutch province of Groningen, the sixth of the eight sons of Ite van Til, a dairy farmer, and his wife Klasina. More than fifty years later, writing an open letter to an imagined unbelieving friend, he described the house without a trace of embarrassment: "I was born in a little thatched roof house with a cow barn attached, in Holland. You wore ‘silver slippers’ and I wore wooden shoes." His memories of that farm are worth having, because they are the only place he ever wrote about himself at length. He played in a sandbox built into the corner of the hay-barn. To get from the hay-barn to the house you went through the cow-barn. There was a bed in there for the hired man, and the boy pestered his parents until they let him sleep in it for a night. Then he lay in the dark listening to the cows jingle their chains, growing less and less sure that it was only the cows, and prayed the words he had been taught for the evening: "Lord, convert me, that I may be converted." Ours, he said, was not in any sense a pietistic family. Nobody wept over religion at the table. There was much more talk about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and the sheep in the winter. But the faith was the air of the place. At his baptism a formula had been read over him saying that he had been conceived and born in sin and yet, as a child of the covenant, redeemed in Christ. A child of the covenant, in the Dutch Reformed way of speaking, is a child born inside the promises God makes to believing parents, and the same formula bound those parents to teach him these things as soon as he could understand them. They did.

(●) 1905 AD: At ten he crossed the Atlantic, and the family began again on a farm in northern Indiana. + In 1905 the Van Tils joined the long Dutch emigration to the American Midwest and settled at Highland, in Lake County at the far northwestern corner of Indiana, within reach of the Chicago markets. It was the same work in a new language: cows, hay, barn. The boy picked up English quickly and spoke it for the rest of his life with very little trace of an accent. He was the first in the family to be sent past the local school, and he never lost the farm. His illustrations in the classroom came out of it for the rest of his life, full of chickens and cows and carpenters and hired men, and students who could not follow a word of his philosophy could always follow the animals.

(●) 1914 – 1927 AD: Thirteen years of schooling carried him from an immigrants’ academy to a Princeton doctorate. + In 1914 he left the farm for Calvin Preparatory School in Grand Rapids, and he stayed inside that world for eight years, through Calvin College, which he finished in 1921, and on into Calvin Theological Seminary. These were the schools of his own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, made up largely of Dutch immigrants like himself, so the move was less a departure than a transfer from one corner of Dutch America to another. Two teachers marked him. Louis Berkhof, whose textbook of systematic theology is still in print, taught him doctrine. W. H. Jellema taught him philosophy, and taught it so well that a well-known non-Christian philosopher would later call Jellema the best teacher of philosophy in the United States. After a single year of seminary he transferred in 1922 to Princeton, which in those days was the great American fortress of orthodox Calvinism. He arrived too late for B. B. Warfield, who had died in 1921, but he found a friend in Geerhardus Vos, another Dutchman who had come east from Grand Rapids and who taught students to read Scripture as one unfolding history of redemption. He also enrolled at the same time as a graduate student in philosophy at Princeton University, so that he was carrying two programs at once. The double effort paid twice. In 1925 he finished a Th.M. at the seminary with a thesis called "Reformed Epistemology," and in the same year he married Rena Klooster, whom he had known since childhood. In 1927 he took a Ph.D. at the university under A. A. Bowman with a dissertation called "God and the Absolute." The argument of that dissertation is the seed of everything he wrote afterwards, and it is worth following slowly. The philosophical idealists of that generation, the men who held that reality is at bottom mind rather than matter, spoke of a single all-embracing mind or "Absolute" in which every fact and every thought was included. Many Christians were pleased to think this was their own God in modern dress, with the philosophers at last on their side. Van Til said it was not, and could not be. Think of the difference between a farmer and his herd. The farmer is the same man on the morning after every cow has been sold; a herd is nothing whatever apart from the animals in it. The God of Scripture is a person who is complete in himself, who made the world out of nothing and stands over against it; the Absolute is a system that needs the world in order to be what it is. The difference is the whole difference.

(●) 1929 AD: He turned down Princeton’s chair of apologetics for a seminary that did not yet exist, Westminster in Philadelphia. + After graduating he took a country pastorate at the Christian Reformed Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, and he loved it. When Princeton Seminary asked him to come and teach apologetics for the academic year 1928 to 1929, he took a leave of absence rather than resign. At the end of that year the seminary offered him its chair of apologetics, which in effect meant a full professorship at the most respected conservative seminary in America, and he was not yet thirty-five. He said no and went back to Spring Lake. Part of the reason was that he wanted to be a pastor. The other part was politics he wanted no share in. That spring the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. had ordered Princeton reorganized under a single board that would speak for the differing viewpoints in the church. Among those viewpoints was that of the nearly thirteen hundred ministers who in 1924 had signed the Auburn Affirmation, a document declaring that the inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection and the miracles of Christ were particular theories about those matters rather than tests a minister had to pass. Van Til would not help carry out that reorganization. J. Gresham Machen, Princeton’s New Testament scholar, would not either. With Robert Dick Wilson and Oswald T. Allis he set about founding an independent seminary, and he wanted Van Til for apologetics. Letters went back and forth; Machen sent Ned Stonehouse, a fellow Dutchman, out to Michigan, and when that failed he made the trip himself, offering a free hand in the department, whatever salary was needed, and at last the suggestion that Van Til need promise only a single year. Van Til held out through the summer and said yes shortly before the opening exercises. Westminster Theological Seminary opened in Philadelphia in the fall of 1929. He taught there for forty-three years.

(●) 1936 AD: When J. Gresham Machen, who had founded Westminster, was put out of the Presbyterian ministry, he left the church of his own people to stand with him. + Machen had founded an independent board for Presbyterian foreign missions, because the denomination’s own board was tolerating among its missionaries exactly the latitude the Auburn Affirmation had argued for, in which no minister could be required to hold the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection. In 1936 he and several others were suspended from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. for refusing to resign from it. The church court that tried him had not even allowed him to make his case from Scripture. That June he and about a hundred and thirty ministers, elders and laymen met at the New Century Club in Philadelphia and formed a new denomination, which after a legal challenge to its first name became the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Van Til did not have to move. He was not a Presbyterian; he was a minister of the Christian Reformed Church, the church of the Dutch immigrant community that had raised him, educated him and ordained him, and nothing in that church was under threat. He transferred anyway, and stayed in the small new denomination for the remaining fifty-one years of his life. Machen died the following January, aged fifty-five, and the seminary and the denomination were left to the younger men.

(●) 1944 AD: He signed a complaint against a colleague’s ordination, and the quarrel cost a small denomination dearly. + Gordon H. Clark was a philosopher of real distinction and a convinced Calvinist, and in August 1944 the Presbytery of Philadelphia ordained him. A presbytery is the regional body of ministers and elders that examines a man and admits him to the ministry. Within two months a complaint against the ordination had been filed, signed by twelve men, Van Til among them. Some of it concerned procedure, since Clark had been examined and ordained quickly and without the usual course of seminary training. The rest concerned doctrine. The doctrinal question was the incomprehensibility of God, which means that God in himself is beyond the reach of any creature’s understanding. Everyone in the room believed that. The dispute was over what follows. Clark held that when God knows a truth and a man knows the same truth, it is the same truth: the proposition "two plus two is four" means one thing, and God and the schoolboy both know that one thing, however differently they hold it. The complainants held that God’s knowledge is of a different order all the way down, so that, as their document put it, "we dare not maintain that his knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point." Van Til’s word for the right relation was analogical: a creature thinks God’s thoughts after him, at the creature’s level, never on the same plane. It went on for four years. The general assemblies let the ordination stand, and in 1948, with the complaint finally turned aside, Clark and those who had defended him left the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The two men never worked together again. John Frame, who studied under Van Til and spent a career defending him, wrote that neither Van Til nor Clark was at his best in the debate, that the technical points at issue were understood by very few, and that the whole affair took much away from the work of the gospel in a small church and a young seminary.

(●) 1972 – 1987 AD: He retired after forty-three years of teaching and went on preaching, on Wall Street and along his own street, until his death at ninety-one. + He retired from the Westminster faculty in 1972 and taught occasionally for several years more. Rena died in 1978, after fifty-three years of marriage. Edmund Clowney remembered visiting the hospital during her last illness, finding the door shut, hearing through it what he took for a groan, and opening it quietly on two old people singing a Dutch psalm together. The retirement did not slow the evangelism, which had never been separable in his mind from the apologetics. There is a much-reproduced photograph of Van Til standing on Wall Street in New York with a Bible in his hand, preaching to whoever would stop. K. Scott Oliphint, who walked with him near the end and later taught his subject at Westminster, recalled that the neighbors along the route would greet him with a line that had clearly been earned: "I suppose he’s talking to you, too, about this Jesus." Years before, a student driving him to address a room of philosophers at Johns Hopkins had watched him lose most of his time to traffic, set his prepared paper aside, and preach on Jonah. He died in Philadelphia on 17 April 1987, aged ninety-one. He had outlived nearly everyone who founded the seminary with him, and he left behind a shelf of books he had mostly been argued into publishing.

What He Taught

(T1) There is no neutral ground, because no mind begins from nowhere. + Van Til’s one piece of writing aimed at unbelievers is a short open letter to an imagined friend, and he opens it by comparing childhoods. You were born in Washington, D.C., he says, under the shadow of the White House; I was born in a thatched house with a cow barn attached. You were read to from a book of the religions of the world, or rather, you correct me, your parents did no such thing, they wanted you to keep an open mind. I was taken to a Christian school and taught that everything I learned belonged to God. Then he springs the trap, and it is a fair one. Shall we say that I was conditioned to believe and you were left free? You were as thoroughly conditioned not to believe in God as I was to believe in God. Neither of us came to this conversation from nowhere. That is the whole of what he means by a presupposition: the thing you are already standing on when you start to reason, the assumption your arguments lean on rather than establish. Everybody has one. The man who says he will follow the evidence wherever it leads has already decided what may count as evidence, and if nothing that requires a Creator is allowed to count, his open mind has quietly closed on the only question at issue. You might think this makes discussion impossible. Van Til thought the opposite. Once both parties say out loud what they are standing on, the conversation can finally be about the thing that actually divides them, instead of shuffling facts back and forth as though facts came with no owner attached.

(Q) "The idea of ‘neutrality’ is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God." + Source: Why I Believe in God, the section on schooling (Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, undated and usually placed about 1948). He has just told his friend that as a schoolboy he assumed his teachers had shielded him from real thinking, and that his friend assumed the reverse about his own upbringing. Both assumptions, he says, were imaginary. To be "without bias" is only to have a particular kind of bias (T1).

(T2) No fact is ever raw: everything a person studies already carries its maker’s name. + Philosophers of Van Til’s day liked to speak of brute facts. A brute fact is one that simply sits there, meaning nothing in particular, waiting for a mind to come along and interpret it: a stone is a stone, and what it signifies is entirely up to you. On that picture the Christian and the atheist can agree about the stone and disagree only about the interpretation laid over it afterwards. Van Til denied that there has ever been a brute fact anywhere in the universe. Every fact is a made thing, and it was made by somebody, for something. He reached for two homely pictures to say it. Think of creation as a great estate whose owner has posted his name at every gate and fencepost; a stranger who wandered in, took soil samples for a year, and then announced that the question of ownership had simply not come up in his research would not be a careful investigator, he would be a man refusing to read. Or think of a linoleum floor with its pattern printed all the way through the material. You cannot scrub the pattern off. You would have to wear away the floor. So for Van Til the scientist and the historian are never handling neutral material. They are handling God’s property, and the question of whose it is meets them in every fact they pick up. This is Paul’s point in Romans 1:19-20, that what can be known about God is plain and men are therefore without excuse, and it is the reason Van Til insisted, following Calvin, that men ought to see in nature not merely that a god exists, or that God probably exists, but the one God who is there.

(Q) "Created reality may be compared to a great estate. The owner has his name plainly and indelibly written at unavoidable places." + Source: Christian Apologetics, chapter 4, "The Problem of Method." He is arguing that the fields the sciences work in are themselves revelation, because "the very essence of created reality is its revelational character." The linoleum follows a sentence later, when he changes the figure (T2).

(T3) The unbeliever already knows God, and spends his strength holding that knowledge down. + If God’s name really is written on everything, then nobody is innocently ignorant of him. Van Til took that consequence seriously and built his method on it. Behind the arguing, every human being carries what Calvin called the sensus divinitatis, the sense of deity: an inescapable awareness that one is a creature and answerable. Paul says the same of men who have never seen a Bible. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth" (Romans 1:18). Suppress is the operative word. You cannot hold down something you do not have. That is what Van Til meant by the point of contact, the place where an apologist’s argument can actually get a grip. Most defenders of the faith look for it in beliefs the two men happen to share on the surface. Van Til said it lies deeper, underneath the unbeliever’s stated position, in the knowledge he is working to keep quiet. The natural man, he wrote, is like someone constantly throwing water on a fire he cannot quench. None of this means the unbeliever is stupid. Van Til was emphatic that sin damages the intellect without dulling it, and his favorite picture for this came off the farm. A carpenter has a buzz saw that is sharp and shining, set to cut fifty boards for a floor. What he does not know is that his seven year old son has been at it and changed the set of the blade. Every board comes out cut slantwise and too short. The saw is not blunt. It is keen, and it is keenly cutting wrong, and the sharper it is the more consistently wrong the boards will be. So, he said, with a first-rate mind that has set itself against God: it will understand Christianity perfectly well in form and will cut it, every time, to a pattern that leaves the Creator out.

(Q) "The natural man is such an one as constantly throws water on a fire he cannot quench." + Source: Christian Apologetics, chapter 3, "The Point of Contact." The sentence comes straight after he cites Romans 1:18 on the suppression of the truth. "Natural man" is the older rendering of Paul’s phrase in 1 Corinthians 2:14, the natural person who does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, and not an insult about intelligence (T3).

(T4) Christianity is not the likelier account of the world; it is what makes accounting for anything possible. + Here is the move everything else in Van Til exists to set up, and it is the reason his name is attached to a whole school. The usual apologetic runs forward: here is the evidence, here is where it points, therefore God probably exists. Van Til’s runs the other way. He called it reasoning by presupposition, and philosophers call this shape a transcendental argument, one that asks not whether a claim is true but what would have to be true for the question to make sense at all. Ask whether a chess move is legal and you have already granted the board, the pieces and the rules; take those away and there is no move to ask about. He described it as a two-stage courtesy. The apologist steps onto his friend’s position, takes it as true for the sake of argument, and shows that on those terms the "facts" turn out not to be facts and the "laws" turn out not to be laws. Then he invites his friend to step onto the Christian position for the sake of argument, and shows that from there everything stands up. Suppose, he says, the world is the product of time and chance. Then your own rationality is a product of chance, and so are the laws of logic you are using to prove it, and so is any order you think you have found. A man in that position is a man made of water in an endless ocean of water, who wants to get out, and so builds a ladder of water, sets it on the water and against the water, climbs out of the water, and falls into the water. Nothing is wrong with his effort except that there is nothing for it to rest on. The obvious objection is that this reasoning is circular, since it uses God to prove God. Van Til agreed it was circular and said that at this level every position is: your starting point, your method and your conclusion always involve one another, and the man who reasons from autonomous human reason to autonomous human reason has drawn a circle too. His own answer to how you prove something so basic used the beams under a floor. You cannot see them the way you see the chairs, but the floor holding the chairs up requires them, and there would be no floor at all if they were not there. You do not read proofs of that kind off the surface. You notice that nothing on the surface would be standing without them.

(Q) "We cannot prove the existence of beams underneath a floor if by proof we mean that they must be ascertainable in the way that we can see the chairs and tables of the room. But the very idea of a floor as the support of tables and chairs requires the idea of beams that are underneath." + Source: Christian Apologetics, chapter 4, "The Problem of Method." He has just conceded, quoting the philosopher A. E. Taylor, that science cannot demonstrate the uniformity of nature it depends on, since every attempt to produce the evidence already assumes the principle. His reply is that a God who governs all things is the only presupposition that accounts for the uniformity the scientist needs, which is why he then says there is "absolutely certain proof" of Christian theism of exactly the beams-under-the-floor kind (T4).

(T5) Common grace explains why unbelieving work is so often good, and why it is still work against God. + A reader who has got this far will have an objection ready, and it is the right one. If unbelief cannot account for logic or facts or morals, how is it that unbelievers build bridges that stand up, write histories worth reading, and are frequently kinder than their Christian neighbors? The Reformed answer is common grace, and the term needs unpacking, because it is easy to hear it as a weaker sort of salvation. It is not. Common grace is the name for the good that God pours out on everyone alike without saving anyone: rain on the just and the unjust, a restraint on how bad things get, the gifts of intelligence and skill and affection handed to believer and unbeliever without distinction. It is why the world is not as bad as the theory of sin might lead you to expect. Van Til wrote two books on it, and he took the plain, cheerful consequence: those who wait for Christ to return on the clouds also thank God for every sunny day. What he would not do was let common grace soften the antithesis, the word he used for the flat opposition between thinking that begins with God and thinking that refuses to. The unbeliever’s good work is real, but it is done with capital he has not earned and does not acknowledge. Van Til pictured himself watching the biologists, the psychologists and the logicians at their labors and finding that all of them, though standing on their heads, were reporting much that is true. He needed only to turn the reports right side up, putting God at the center instead of man, to have a marvelous display of the facts as God intended them to be seen. So the two accounts are not rival estimates of how much good there is in the world. They agree about the good. They disagree, totally, about whose it is.

(Q) "While they actually expect Christ to return visibly on the clouds of heaven, they thank God for every sunny day." + Source: Christian Apologetics, chapter 2, "The Christian Philosophy of Life." The sentence comes a paragraph after a warning about men who "dream dreams of a paradise regained by means of common grace," and its own paragraph gives his summary of what Christ’s work covers: "Far as the curse is found, so far his grace is given" (T5).

(Q) "Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy." + Source: Why I Believe in God, the closing lines (Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, undated and usually placed about 1948). The letter closes with an invitation to dinner next Sunday and the friend getting up to catch the last bus at twelve. Just before that Van Til has said he will not convert anybody at the end of an argument, and has staked the strongest claim an apologist can make: "I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else." Then, instead of claiming the result, he hands the man over to God. It is the best short statement of what he thought argument is for.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) A presuppositional school of apologists grew up around him, and it argues his way still. + Van Til published slowly and mostly in-house, and for most of his career his real publication was the classroom. The students carried it out. The first book-length study of him was R. J. Rushdoony’s By What Standard? in 1959; in 1971 a group of scholars honored his seventy-fifth birthday with a festschrift, the volume of essays that colleagues traditionally present to a teacher late in his career, this one called Jerusalem and Athens, in which Van Til answered most of the contributors in turn and opened the volume with a plain statement of his position called "My Credo." Two students in particular made him usable. Greg Bahnsen turned the method into something a person could do out loud, and his 1985 debate with the atheist Gordon Stein, which pressed the question of how an unbeliever accounts for the laws of logic, has very likely been heard by more people than have read any of Van Til’s books; his Van Til’s Apologetic (1998) is the standard sourcebook. John Frame wrote the fullest study, Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought (1995), and called him perhaps the most important Christian thinker since Calvin while criticizing him freely, which is the best sort of tribute a teacher can get. Vern Poythress applied the approach to biblical interpretation and to science, William Edgar edited the second edition of Christian Apologetics, and K. Scott Oliphint, whom Van Til mentored in his last years, edited the fourth edition of The Defense of the Faith in 2008. The reach went past the seminary. Van Til’s insistence that Christ’s lordship covers arithmetic and gardening as much as prayer, inherited from Abraham Kuyper, became one of the foundations of the Christian day school movement in North America, and phrases he taught his students, "worldview," "antithesis," "no neutrality," are now common currency among Christians who have never heard his name.

(†) The apologists he criticized answered him, and both sides came away sharper. + Van Til did not merely propose a new method; he said the old one was wrong, and that Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Butler and William Paley had been conceding the argument before it began. Nobody expected that to go unanswered. The fullest reply came in 1984 from R. C. Sproul, John Gerstner and Arthur Lindsley in Classical Apologetics, which described itself as offering a friendly refutation. Their case was that the traditional arguments do not grant the unbeliever autonomy, they only meet him where he stands, exactly as Paul met the Athenians at the altar to an unknown god (Acts 17:22-23), and that a defense which cannot say "here is the evidence" has given up something Scripture itself uses. The complaints had begun long before that. J. Oliver Buswell reviewed Common Grace sharply in The Bible Today in 1948 and charged him with idealist pantheism, the view that God and the world come finally to one thing rather than two, which was an odd charge to bring against a man whose whole case turned on a Creator standing over against what he had made. James Daane wrote a whole volume against him. Gordon Clark contested the analogical account of knowledge from within the Reformed camp. Van Til answered his critics at length, which is why The Defense of the Faith in its first edition reads as much like a running reply as a textbook. The most interesting near miss came from another direction. Beginning in the late 1970s Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff argued that belief in God can be properly basic, rationally held without being inferred from anything else, which is a conclusion Van Til would have welcomed and arrived at by a route he never took. Frame observed with some regret that these philosophers largely did not engage him, and that Van Til’s isolation, a Dutchman writing technical idealist vocabulary for a seminary press, kept his influence smaller than the quality of the idea deserved.

(†) Where his own record invites criticism: an unsettled account of what the unbeliever knows, and a quarrel he need not have pressed. + The sharpest criticism of Van Til comes from the men who spent their lives defending him, which is the fairest place to take it from. - He never settled what the unbeliever knows. In one place he writes that it is impossible to find a common area of knowledge between believers and unbelievers, and that without the light of Christianity man can no more have a correct view of himself and the world than of God. Pressed, he replied with some exasperation that he had never denied that the unbeliever has true knowledge. Frame, who assembled both sets of quotations, concluded that the various explanations Van Til offered for the tension are neither adequate to Scripture nor consistent with each other, and that a Christian apologist need not be embarrassed to find himself agreeing with an unbeliever about something. - He would not define his terms. Students who asked for a definition, or who tried to lay an argument out step by step, were usually met with the same ground covered again in the same words. He seems to have trusted repetition to do the work of analysis. The cost shows in the literature: both his followers and his opponents have often argued about a Van Til neither of them had straight. - He preferred confrontation to conversation. He said hard things about Roman Catholic, Arminian and less consistent Reformed theology, rarely entered a genuine dialogue, and in the Clark affair helped press a complaint against a colleague’s ordination that consumed a young denomination for four years and ended with good men walking out. Scripture asks for the defense to be made "with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15), and it also says that iron sharpens iron (Proverbs 27:17); Van Til had little of the first and, by his own students’ account, was denied much of the second by the isolation he had partly chosen. None of this touches the central insight, which is why the men who catalog the faults keep teaching the method. Van Til saw, with a clarity few before him had managed, that the deepest disagreement between the Christian and his neighbor is not about the evidence but about what is allowed to count as evidence, and that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge (Proverbs 1:7) is a claim about knowledge and not only about piety.