Via Oshea Davis In light of the critiques of Van Til vs. Gordon Clark, I thought it would be best to post what Clark himself said about Van Til. This, as Doug as has point out is later in the history of the debate. Now, the context of this is about the theology of the Trinity. Clark will discuss Van Til and show what Van Til teaches on the Trinity leads to a contradiction, which leads to skepticism and nonsense. The good thing is that the broad questions being addressed are ultimate questions of logic, epistemology and theology, and so are applicable for today. Gordon Clark, The Trinity, The Trinity Foundation, 2010, pg.105-117. (thanks to Tyler and Joel, for helping to get the quote) We now come to the distinguished Professor of Theology at Westminster Seminary, Cornelius Van Til. The discussion concerns the inferences Dr. Van Til draws from his theory of incomprehensibility as applied to the doctrine of the Trinity. In a Complaint against the Presbytery of Philadelphia, signed by several of Westminster’s faculty, Van Til expounds his view. The Complaint is a rather long document of fifteen pages, three columns each. Because of its length, because of its multiple signatories, and because it is a judicial complaint, one can be sure that it accurately states Van Til’s position. But because of the length only a short summary can be given here. On page two in column three the Complaint contends that “The doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God is not a mere qualification of his knowability; it is not the doctrine that God can be known only if he makes himself known.... It is rather that God because of his very nature must remain incomprehensible to man.” Thus at the very beginning the document lays down the principle that incomprehensibility means incomprehensibility. However, there soon comes a negative statement. “Because God is God...the divine knowledge and the knowledge possible to man may never be conceived of merely in quantitative terms, as a difference of degree rather than a difference in kind.” I do not know how many “degrees” there are to the knowledge that “David was king of Israel,” or that “two plus two is four,” but at any rate God has a different “kind” of knowledge, so they say. One expects the Complaint to define what “kind” of knowledge that is, for unless the “kind” be known, the difference in kind cannot be defended. If this “kind” is not explained, how could it be that “its meaning does not remain uncertain because of its uniform significance in the history of Christian thought”? (4:2). But we have seen that such uniform significance is not to be found in the history of Christian thought. In fact some of the authors the Complaint quotes have differed with others. The present treatise has already refuted the Complaint’s appeal to several Scripture passages (4:3), and its interpretation of Matthew 11:27 omits the last phrase of the verse. On page 5 (column 1) the Complaint holds that there is a “qualitative distinction between the contents of the knowledge of God and the contents of the knowledge possible to man.” One must insistently ask, What is this qualitative difference? One must also ask, What does quality mean? Does not the proposition “David was King of Israel” have the same meaning for both God and man? No doubt God knows more about the details of that kingship than man does, but does not the proposition itself, unencumbered with additional truths, have precisely one meaning which God and man hold in common? What qualitative difference could there be? It is the same proposition in both minds. The only important quality, so far as I can see, is its truth. Does it have for God the quality of being false? The Complaint hints that for man “David was king” is a proposition, even though it tentatively suggests that divine knowledge might not be propositional (5:2). One must ask, Where did they obtain the information that for God truth is not propositional? All the truth in the Bible is propositional. The dependence of the complainants on the Bible is not clear, for they object to the statement that all the Bible was given to us for us to understand. Yet is this not what 2 Timothy 3:16 says? The climax of the Complaint, so far as this theme is concerned, is the definitive statement that “We dare not maintain that his knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point” (5:3). If this were so, the proposition “David was king” would have two totally, totally, different meanings, one for God and one for man, with not a single point of coincidence. Nothing that we could get from the sentences in the Bible would be what God meant by them. Clearly we could not think God’s thoughts after him. Since God knows all truth, and since God’s mind and ours do not have a single point in common, man can know nothing at all. This view of incomprehensibility, which is surely not the view commonly held in the history of the Christian church, bears on the doctrine of the Trinity. It obviously must. In what way or ways we shall now try to see. The most glaring departure from the orthodox faith that this theory leads to with reference to the Trinity comes to the fore in the answer a Christian usually gives to the charge that the doctrine of the Trinity is self-contradictory. To many people, not only Muslims, but Jews also, and atheists in particular, the doctrine of the Trinity seems self- contradictory and absurd. It is arithmetically impossible for one to equal three. But we Trinitarians have learned some other subjects in addition to arithmetic. The United States government is one government of three almost independent divisions. The governing board of a small business can be one board of three officers. There is nothing selfcontradictory about a situation being one in one sense and three in a different respect. This is not to say that the United States government, or the business corporation, is an exact replica of the Trinity. There are many ways in which three can be one. The point is that there is no contradiction in asserting one-ness and three-ness in two different senses. Most amazingly Van Til has repudiated this defense of the Trinity and has asserted that the Godhead is three and one in precisely the same sense. In his Junior Systematics (178, 179, mimeographed by the Reformed Episcopal Seminary, 1940) he writes, “We do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person.... We must maintain that God is numerically one, He is one person.” A slight evidence that this latter has not been the position of the church through the ages is a rubric in the Episcopal Prayer Book which says, “Upon the Feast of Trinity only, may be said, Who art one God, one Lord, not one only Person, but three Persons in one Substance.... “Note the phrase, “not one only Person.” Another piece of evidence for those who wish to look it up is Loraine Boettner’s Studies in Theology (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1980, 125). A. H. Strong also declares that “The doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory. This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence” (Systematic Theology, I, 345). In the fine print, so conspicuous in Strong’s volumes, he quotes another theologian who refuses to say that God is one person: “We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons.” One may also regress as far back as Gregory of Nyssa. To be sure he was interested in refuting Sabellianism, and though thus his words are not directly applicable to the present point, they support it by implication. He wrote, “We do not let our idea about them be melted down into One Person” (Against Eunomius, Book I, §35). Since in the history of theology so few theologians, perhaps none, have asserted that God is One Person and Three Persons – not even Sabellius – explicit denials are hard to find. But implicit denials abound. To quote John Gill again, “Nor is the article [on one God] to be understood in the Sabellian sense, that God is not but one person; for though there is but one God, there are three Persons” (A Body of Divinity, I, xxvi, 2). This is not to suggest that Van Til is a Sabellian; but had he been the author instead of Gill, he would have probably added that God was also one Person. Gill has no such idea. Indeed down further in the same column Gill adds, “If Father, Son, and Spirit were but one Person, they could not be testifiers as they are said to be in 1 John 5:7.” Since this matter involves the law of contradiction, it is proper to note that Gill continues by insisting that John 10:30 “cannot mean one person for this is to make him say what is most absurd and contradictory” (Sovereign Grace edition, 1971, 128, column 2). Does not all this show that Van Til’s position is not the uniform heritage of the church? Could not one call it a novelty? To indicate that this treatise neither misunderstands nor distorts Van Til’s position, we further quote An Introduction to Systematic Theology (1949, 224-226). Here he repeats his allegation that the Trinity is One Person: “We do assert that God, that is, the whole Godhead, is one person.... Even within the ontological Trinity we must maintain that God is numerically one. He is one person....”[3] On this basis Dr. Van Til concludes that the defense given just above, against the allegation that the doctrine is self- contradictory, is an untenable defense. He even suggests that one need not accept the law of contradiction. On page 10 of the same syllabus he had already said, “The laws of human thought and the laws of ethics are not eternal and unchangeable in the sense that God is unchangeable.” What the two senses of the term unchangeable are is hard to guess at. What else can unchangeable mean other than that the thing in question remains the same? Some unknown and highly suspicious different meaning contributes nothing intelligible to any argument. But suppose the laws of thought could be changed. John Dewey asserts that this actually happens. Even the law of contradiction will eventually be changed. This means that truth and falsehood will be identical. According to Aristotelian logic it is impossible for both “All a is b” and “Some a is not b” to be true. If one is true, the other must be false. Now, if God is superior to logic and somewhat arbitrarily imposed the distinction between truth and error on us, but does not himself think that way, then the statements “All dogs are mammals” and “Some dogs are not mammals” are both true. They are also both false, for apart from Aristotelian logic the statement “No dogs are mammals” is equally true. What Dewey sees in the future, this view attributes to God now. God therefore is irrational. What he tells us in the Bible is as false as it is true. Not only are all propositions both true and false, but the individual words have no meaning. By the basic law of logic a word, to mean something, must also mean not something. Cat must mean a pussy, but it must also not mean dog. If a given word should mean everything, it would mean nothing. Suppose the dictionary should list, as the meaning of cat, anchovy, baboon, curl, dog, energy, flower, all the way down to zyzomys; then “cat cat cat cat” would mean the baboon eats anchovies energetically. Of course, it would also mean that Monday is Thursday. For corroboration of the foregoing, with respect both to the exposition and the analysis, one can again cite the Junior Systematics. On page 140 Van Til begins a section on The Incomprehensibility and Knowability of God. What does Van Til mean by incomprehensibility? “We mean by it,” he says, “that God is exhaustively comprehensible to himself and is therefore known by man only to the extent that he voluntarily reveals himself.” In other words, incomprehensibility is God’s being comprehensible to himself. This is like saying that an invertebrate is not a vertebrate. It is a case of defining a word by itself; or, more exactly, it is a case of defining a word by its contradictory. This is circular, and, you know, circles are vicious. After a page of sentences many of which are true enough, such as “God is light,” Van Til calls on Bavinck for help. “Dogmatics is face to face with ‘the Incomprehensible One.’... Our knowledge of God is true but never ‘adequate.’ By the term adequate Bavinck constantly means ‘comprehensible’” (141). Thus we get dizzy going around. To indicate that this brief quotation does not misrepresent Van Til’s position, we note similar statements on the next page. “The true notion [of incomprehensibility as opposed to false notions] is nothing but that limitation which is involved for the knowledge of man in the fact that God is self-contained” (142). Actually this says less than the opening statements, for presumably everybody’s knowledge of anything is “self-contained,” since clearly (a < b) < (a < b). It is true that Van Til immediately begins to criticize Bavinck for not thinking clearly enough; and the previous section of this treatise agrees with that criticism. Nevertheless the quotations just made seem to represent Van Til’s own thought and not merely a resumé of Bavinck. Indeed the several pages of criticisms of Bavinck are mainly well founded. In his further elucidation of the doctrine Van Til makes two assertions which cannot both be true. On page 178 we find this argument: //It is sometimes asserted that we can prove to men that we are not asserting anything that ought to be considered irrational, inasmuch as we say that God is one in essence and three in persons. We therefore claim that we have not asserted unity and trinity of exactly the same thing.// //Yet this is not the whole truth of the matter. We do as sert that God, that is the whole Godhead, is one person. We have noted how each attribute is coextensive with the Being of God. We are compelled to maintain this in order to avoid the notion of an uninterpreted being of some sort.... We have noted how theologians insist that each of the persons of the Godhead is co-terminous with the Being of the Godhead.... “Each person,” says Bavinck, “is equal to the whole essence of God and co-terminous with both other persons and with all three” (Dogmatik, Volume II, 311).// Note the situation. When opponents have objected that the doctrine of the Trinity is logically self- contradictory because it makes three equal to one, Christians have usually replied that there are many examples of situations that are three in one sense and one in a different sense. Hence there is no contradiction. Here Van Til rejects this defense of the Trinity and asserts that the Trinity is both one and three in the same sense: not one substance and three Persons, but one Person and three Persons. This is indeed contradictory and utterly irrational. Look at his words again: “We do assert that God, that is the whole Godhead, is one person.” He defends this irrationalism on the ground that “each attribute is co-extensive with the Being of God.” Now, some attributes apply equally to all three Persons; for example, omnipotence and omniscience. But the attribute of Fatherhood and Sonship are not “co-extensive with the Being of God.” Sonship is not attributable to the Father, nor to the Spirit. Perhaps Van Til will reply that Sonship is not an “attribute.” If this is his reply, one must ask, How does an attribute differ from a quality? Christ has the quality or characteristic of being omnipotent and of being Son. Why is one predicate an attribute and another not an attribute? Do we not attribute paternity to the Father, and to the Father alone? How can Fatherhood be coterminous with Sonship? As the Athanasian Creed stated, there are some predicates that attach to each of the three Persons equally. There are not three “Greats,” but only one “Great.” But there are also predicates that attach to one Person singly. If this were not so, there could not be three Persons, and the Father would be the Son. A quotation from a later book, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1969) will further illustrate Van Til’s troubles with logic. He wrote, “I do not artificially separate induction from deduction, or reasoning about the facts of nature from reasoning in apriorianalytical fashion.... On the contrary I see induction and analytical reasoning as part of one process of interpretation” (293). Later on, in his rejoinder to Knudsen, we shall see that he stigmatizes analytical reasoning as a work of the devil. If here he identifies the two forms of reasoning as a single process, one is inclined to conclude that he rejects them both. We can ignore this point for the moment. The word “artificially” in the quotation above is a weasel word. It allows but does not specify some non-artificial separation. One must therefore either limit the criticism to a charge of having said nothing intelligible, or delete the word “artificial.” The point at issue is one of method. Results sometimes impress the general public when they do not know the method is faulty and the whole is useless. This is the case here. Crows can furnish an example of the method of induction. A young ornithologist sees a crow and notes that it is black. He sees a second crow and notes that it is black. He sees a third and a fourth. Then after 99 or 999 cases he infers that the next crow will be black. In fact he concludes that all crows are black. The conclusion is false because a few crows, not noticed by the young student, are albinos. Of course the 1000th crow may be black too. Indeed it might have been that all crows are black, but even so the method cannot justify the universal conclusion. Induction is a logical fallacy. The same fallacy occurs in Biblical archaeology. Van Til modestly acknowledges, “I do not personally do a great deal of this because my colleagues in other departments of the Seminary in which I teach are doing it better than I could do it. Every bit of historical investigation...is bound to confirm the claims of the Christian position” (293). Now, it is possible that an archaeological discovery might “confirm” the Christian position; but before such confirmation, the truth claim would have had to be independently established; and this archaeology cannot do. Suppose for example that before 1962 the critics insisted that seven stemmed lamps never existed before the late Persian empire and that therefore because of Exodus 25:31-35 and 37:17-21 the book could not have been written before the sixth century. Then in 1962 a dig uncovers a seven stemmed lamp which pottery dating puts before the time of Abraham. This discomfits the destructive critics; but it is far from proving inerrancy. There may be 999 true historical statements in the Bible, but this does not prove that the 1000th is true. Nor can archaeology prove even one theological statement to be true. The method as a whole is wrong. Induction is always a fallacy. Fortunately, contrary to what Van Til says, induction can be separated from deduction, for the conclusion of a valid syllogism follows from its premises necessarily. It is what the Westminster Confession calls “good and necessary consequence.” Furthermore, Van Til claims to be a presuppositionalist. But there is no logical place for induction in presuppositionalism. One assumes or presupposes certain axioms and from there on everything is deduction. Van Til, however, has left himself an escape-hatch. In his Junior Systematics he wrote, “We should observe that it is not possible to find a term with respect to method that avoids all difficulties. We can speak of our method as the method of implication if we only realize that after all we mean something different with the term ‘implication’ just as we mean something different with the term ‘induction’ from what the non christian logician means by it” (14). On the following page he specifies analogical as another term to which he attaches a meaning different from the meaning in ordinary English. The trouble, however, is that he does not attach another meaning. He attaches no meaning at all. Above I explained and gave an example of induction. I should define a valid implication as an inference whose form of the conclusion is true every time the form(s) of its premise(s) are true. Now, if someone does not like these definitions, he is free to present his own for consideration. But if he disagrees with those given and then refuses to supply substitutes, he has said nothing of importance. One cannot examine and evaluate an unstated position. There is no position to evaluate. This reminds me of a dinner the students of Westminster Seminary put on for Van Til and me. I spoke on the subject of individuation – a subject that bears on the trinity of the divine persons. Dr. Van Til replied in an impressive manner. He disagreed with me completely. Then a student, whose ashes have now been scattered over his beloved Colorado mountains, stood up and asked, “Dr. Van Til, you have objected to Dr. Clark’s theory of individuation; what is your theory of individuation?” Dr. Van Til for the next ten minutes replied with the fluency and vigor for which he is so well known. Then the student rose a second time and asked, “But, Dr. Van Til what is your theory of individuation?” The tall and handsome professor spoke for another five minutes. Then for the last time the student rose and asked, “But, Dr. Van Til, what is your theory of individuation?” And the question was never answered. Dr. Van Til’s rejection of logic is reproduced by some of his students, for example, Vern S. Poythress (Philosophy, Science, and the Sovereignty of God, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1976). On page 6 his rejection of sharp distinctions is so limited by the context that no one can object to it. But as one reads on, the avoidance of sharp distinctions expands. A moderate amount of chapter two is rather vague and fuzzy. That this is not a case of inadvertence becomes clear on page 31, where he explicitly declares, “I remind my readers again that none [italics his] of my technical terms have (sic) precise boundaries.” A footnote to this, on page 106, elaborates: “there is no precise ‘meaning-kernel,’ but rather a blur with a (roughly) fixed center.” On this basis, however, any objection to Arianism has no force. Not only does three mean one, but created, begotten, God, and angel are all a blur with a fixed center that cannot be located. The reader should note that the term roughly and the parentheses in which it is enclosed are Poythress’ own: They were not put there by the present writer. The present writer maintains that strict definitions are an indispensable means of making progress in a very difficult subject. Another one of Dr. Van Til’s students, in maintaining that the distinction between three Persons or hypostaseis and one ousia or substance is so vague that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be defended against the charge of self-contradiction, argues “It would solve the apparent contradiction if we knew clearly what a substance (ousia) was, what a person (hypostasis) was, and precisely how the two are related. But we don’t.” To this I answer that there is not even an apparent contradiction if we say that God is one in one sense and three in a different sense. The gentleman in question assumes that there is an apparent contradiction. But this is no more than his subjective reaction. An apparent something is something that appears. The alleged contradiction does not appear to me. Appearances differ from person to person. Some verses in the Bible seem difficult to some people, but clear and easy to others. Yet it appears to me that the Van Tilian position assumes that an apparent contradiction must be apparent to everybody. For him difficulty lies in the Scripture verse itself, not in the reader. The falsity of such a position should be obvious to all, even to Van Tilians. But it appears to me that it does not so appear to them. The second point in defending the traditional answer to the charge of self-contradiction is the denial of the previously quoted requirement. The gentleman said that to avoid the apparent contradiction we should have to know clearly what a substance was, what a person was, and precisely how the two are related – but we don’t. On one point the writer is correct: We don’t. But it is the aim of serious theology to make its terms clear and precise. I want to do so; I shall most probably, most certainly, fail. Some of the terms have been listed above. They should be defined and their mutual relations should be clarified. I hope to make some small contribution toward this end, if even only to get rid of the term substance. But failure to accomplish much does not invalidate the force of the reply to the charge that three-in-one is a self-contradiction. Recall that Augustine, though he could not define his terms, was content to know that their meanings were different. All that is needed is the realization that the Athanasian Creed does not use the terms substance and person in the same sense. Verse four says, “neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance.” Who can be so obtuse as to deny that Substance and Person are intended to have different meanings? And if the meanings are different, all appearance of contradiction vanishes from a normal mind. Augustine himself, even though not so advanced as the creed his influence initiated, made it unmistakably clear that three and one have different referents
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 17:16:12 +0000
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