Junius And Van Til On Natural Knowledge Of God

By Nathan D. Shannon

[Nathan D. Shannon is assistant professor of systematic theology at Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul, S. Korea.]

Abstract

This article compares the views of Franciscus Junius and Cornelius Van Til regarding pre- and post-fall natural knowledge of God. It is argued that while differences are clear, Junius and Van Til both claimed that pre-fall natural theology was not intended to function independently of special revelation. Junius and Van Til also agree that post-fall natural theology, unaided by special revelation, is not theology in any meaningful sense. The conclusion, borrowed from Willem Van Asselt, is that for both Junius and Van Til the determining factor with regard to the structure and status of natural theology is the God-human relationship. This thesis, so far as it is true, enhances the historical credentials of Van Til’s characteristically neo-Calvinist view of natural theology and natural reason.

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According to Franciscus Junius (d. 1602), since the fall, true theology is possible only where a redemptive divine-human relation is established “through the communication of grace.”[1] For Junius this relational reconciliation is a necessary condition of true theology. Outside of this relational establishment, theology—dubiously so-called—may be found, but it is necessarily theologia falsa. There is for Junius no activity of the natural man which may properly be called “theology.”[2] Cornelius Van Til’s (d. 1987) objection to natural theology is based on the same paradigm—divine-human relational breakdown renders illegitimate whatever cognitive theistic activity there is in the unregenerate; it is theology only in an equivocal because idolatrous sense. Since true theology is determined by redemptive relation, natural theology, lacking this redemptive relation, is not true theology, not in fact theology at all. Natural theology is in the end anti-theology. It is the burden of this article to demonstrate that the relational theme is constitutive of the structure and character of pre-fall Edenic and post-fall hamartic natural theology in Franciscus Junius’s Treatise on True Theology as well as in Cornelius Van Til’s view of natural theology.

The substance and viability of a “Reformed objection to natural theology” received renewed attention following upon the work of Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.[3] In addition, the role of natural reason, sometimes in the person of Thomas Aquinas, in all seasons of historic Calvinism is the focus of lively debate and discussion today. This article is designed to contribute in various ways, in particular by bolstering the historical credentials of Van Til’s position, which I take, though without defense here, to be more or less representative of neo-Calvinism. This article thus stands to nuance our understanding of early orthodox views and to unsettle the claim that neo-Calvinist distrust of unregenerate reason is just an over-reaction to the Enlightenment.

I. The Importance Of Junius’s Treatise

Scholars of historic Reformed theology are fortunate now to have David Noe’s English translation—the first—of Franciscus Junius’s De vera theologia (1594). This work complements Willem J. Van Asselt’s brief analysis of the primary text, published in 2002.[4] As Van Asselt explains, the first generation of Reformers had not addressed issues of prolegomena.[5] That task fell to their successors, and it became a major industry not only of the Reformed but of seventeenth-century European theology generally in an age of post-Reformation confessionalization.[6] Enter Franciscus Junius, to compose among the earliest and most extensive treatments of theological prolegomena of the first two centuries of Protestantism. Writes Van Asselt: “One of the fundamental issues in the prolegomena of the Reformed orthodox systems was the meaning and usage of the term ‘theology’; Franciscus Junius … was a man whose teaching on this topic is of considerable interest.”[7]

Junius’s Treatise is interesting as an especially timely example of the new Reformed movement’s critical interaction with regnant theological heritage.[8] In fact the greater emphasis of the Treatise embraces late medieval categories. Theology properly so called originates in the self-knowledge of God. The theology communicated to creatures is fashioned by God from the divine original and fitted to the finite capacity of the creature. This distinction between archetypal and ectypal theology dates at least to medieval scholasticism, perhaps specifically to Scotus.[9] By 1700 Junius’s re-formulation of the archetype/ectype pairing was normative in continental Reformed theology and was appreciated in England as well.[10] And yet, Junius’s view of natural (as in unregenerate) theology marks a conspicuous point of departure from pre-Reformation scholasticism.

Junius’s Treatise demonstrates that “the Reformed conception of Christian theology is fundamentally a relational enterprise, determined by and determinative of the divine-human relationship.”[11] We may assume that here Van Asselt refers primarily to Junius’s definition of theologia vera, to the archetype/ectype structure specifically. It is nonetheless easy to see that if this is true of true theology, then the same relational component will in a complementary fashion determine the character of natural theology as well. If true theology is necessarily preceded by gracious establishment of a redemptive relation, then where this relation is not established—in the case of the post-fall unregenerate —theology cannot be true, or properly called theology. One might say that the truth or soundness of true theology is little more than the cognitive aspect of the redemptive relation.[12] Though there are differences between Junius and Van Til in the details, for both writers relationality is the key to the religious life of Adam in the garden; and for both Junius and Van Til, the impossibility of true theology apart from monergistic establishment of relational restoration is of the essence of the state of sin.

II. Junius On Pre-Fall Natural Theology

Van Asselt may slightly overstate when he says that “pagan natural theology does not play a role” in Junius’s Treatise on True Theology.[13] Though Junius himself had a peculiar aversion to the subject, as he says, “labor in searching out false theology is pointless,”[14] he nonetheless devotes to the topic resources sufficient for a relatively nuanced definition, beginning in the initial pages of the Treatise in which he distinguishes true from false theology.[15]

To his opening question—whether true theology exists—Junius defends an affirmative answer arguing from among other things something like common consent.[16] Junius rehearses a doctrine of the general revelatory character of the extra-mental world, and adds to the vocalic metaphors of Ps 19 an “outstretched finger” of nature which draws attention to “that discourse and reasoning concerning the divine which we call theology.”[17]

He then turns to the image-bearer as himself revelatory. Of the race corporately he says that innate knowledge and the light of nature have taught all men of the existence of God and of theology—first, in Junius’s order, knowledge of God and then, consequently, of the existence of God as the condition of the possibility of such knowledge.[18] Junius also claims that introspection can discover nothing that does not display acquaintance with God. Echoing Rom 1 and Ps 19, he writes: “These things are quite familiar to all and have been shown by God to individuals in such a way that no man, however rude or untrained he might be, and removed from all learning, can be unaware that the theology which we are discussing indeed exists.”[19]

From this opening section of the Treatise it is clear that, first, there is a twofold natural or general revelation of God which we might describe as internal and external or objective and subjective. The subjective receives here slightly greater emphasis, and Junius’s interest is in the clarity and universality of this revelation. This internal or subjective general revelation is not theological information available to the human creature but is rather already knowledge, a kind of pre-formed theology, with which the image-bearer always finds himself, confirmation of which awaits every introspective moment. There is, writes Junius, “nothing in us which does not show that theology exists,” and this “very obviously overwhelms those who say otherwise.”[20]

Junius does not at this point—as I have just done—use the word “revelation.” He says “theology,” by which he means “wisdom of divine matters inspired by God according to divine truth,” where “divine matters” include: “of course God, and whatsoever topics have been arranged with respect to Him.”[21] And wisdom, as I have just noted, is not merely information, but rather a received context or character of mind: “our definition of theology … includes the intellection of first principles, the knowledge of conclusions and ends, and it is the most beneficial skill of our work, by which we strive toward God.”[22] There is a terminological difference here between Junius and Van Til, to be discussed below. Note that for Junius divine grace is operative here in the pre-fall situation. Junius speaks of both natural and supernatural pre-fall theology, and so of natural and supernatural Edenic graces. Since Junius affirms a non-redemptive kind of grace, we may expect him to view any possession of theology (or revelation) as in some sense gracious—even perhaps that natural knowledge of God possessed yet suppressed by the unregenerate in the state of sin.

Pre-fall natural theology appears first, in ch. 9 of the Treatise, as one component of a twofold mode of the communication of theology. There is, Junius explains, a twofold mode of communicating theology by which “we become sharers in this theology.”[23] That duplex mode is, by nature, “an internal principle of communication,” and, by grace, an “external principle.”[24]

Junius shifts, without explanation, from modus communicatio to principia communicatio. Apparently shifting next from principia communicatio to principia theologiae, he says that this twofold mode or principle of communication “happens as an internal principle” and as “an external principle,” respectively: “Thus it happens,” he says, “that the one theology is termed natural and the other supernatural.”[25] The unity of the internal and the external principles, of the natural and the supernatural, is God. God Himself is the principle: “Now in fact the shared principle of nature equally as of grace is God, the author of all good in the universe, whether that good exists according to nature or above it.”[26]

Junius characterizes the principles of pre-fall natural theology as common, veiled, and imperfect.[27] “Adam … possessed these principles” incomplete but “uncorrupted,”[28] and he thus was able, according to the limited nature of these principles of natural revelation and of creaturely reasoning, “to acquire some knowledge of divine matters according to the limit of his intact nature.”[29] Junius believed that the epistemic potential of the pre-fall situation required cultivation. With all that was included in the original situation, Adam could by means of the exercise of his intellect draw theological inferences proportionate to the capacity of the revelational media and his own understanding, but only by means of intellectual self-exertion. Such effort on Adam’s part should not be understood as the deployment of non-theological cognitive machinery to the internalizing of theological data; rather, creaturely cognition is itself theological (as in revelatory), since reason itself is always expressive of its own principles.[30]

The limitations of which Junius here speaks are not those of Kantian phenomenalism. Junius is willing to affirm the ability of pre-fall, unaided, finite reason to think truly about an infinite God, just as the apostle is willing to affirm the clear perception in created media of the invisible things of God. But it is not clear that this ability was ever put to use.

Early in the Treatise (ch. 4), Junius affirms innate acquaintance with God and with the fact of his existence, and later (ch. 10), soundness of the natural (internal) principle and its capacity for development by pre-fall natural reason. Junius, however, never says that Adam did in fact avail himself of this original epistemic endowment. Junius’s explanation of the original principles of pre-fall natural theology is positive but restrained.

The natural, uncorrupted internal principle was in Junius’s view inferior to the supernatural, external one. Junius seems at times to view the comparison in terms of lesser to greater, the natural one appearing quantitatively inferior to the supernatural.[31] But in fact this is not his view. Junius views the pre-fall natural principle as subject to perfection but only according to nature. The natural principle is in itself neither subject to nor capable of supernatural completion or perfection, because it is of a different kind altogether.[32] He writes:

Reason indeed is nature’s workman in the human being created in God’s image. By the cultivation of that reason, these principles had to advance … to a kind of perfection according to the capacity of their natural ability.[33]

But then he adds:

What then? Was knowledge of divine matters able to be perfected in the unspoiled man by these, so to speak, tools of nature? By no means. For reason itself could not but work from obscurity and imperfection, since it possessed the material for producing knowledge from no other source than these principles.[34]

Junius believed that pre-fall natural theology involved Adam’s righteous and spontaneous recognition of the internal natural principle as both from and about him whose image Adam himself bore. That theology was capable of development and even of a natural sort of perfection. But it was not capable of supplementation by a principle of supernatural grace, because natural and supernatural are incompatible. Pre-fall natural theology could not be joined to pre-fall supernatural grace; the pre-fall natural needed to be replaced. The distinction, therefore, is categorical and qualitative: pre-fall natural theology as such is good and sound; pre-fall supernatural theology would have been categorically, qualitatively better. Junius believed that the possibility of a supernatural principle supervening upon the natural one was the theological advance offered to Adam in the covenant of life. Pre-fall supernatural theology, in other words, represented the offered prize of original covenant eschatology; it is the cognitive side of consummate creator/creature communion represented in the tree of life:

Even in the actual unspoiled human nature, theology could not have been perfected according to the perfection of human nature taken in itself, but that theology was to be perfected by God’s supernatural grace, or rather to be abolished, as it were, by a perfection that would enter into its place. As a result, man would continue on after he was enriched by supernatural theology, and by supernatural virtue he would be translated to that blessed condition through grace.… Nor is there any reason why someone should be surprised that we say natural theology was to be abolished by the supernatural.… This replacement is not only of a different form, but also of a different and most perfect genus. It will swallow up, so to speak, this form of our theology and carry it into its perfection.[35]

In the garden, original knowledge of God was not capable of supernatural supplementation or augmentation to become greater.[36] Good but mutable knowledge of God—Adam’s epistemic context as a whole—was to be, in association with confirmed obedience and covenantal advance, replaced by a greater, imperishable knowledge of God.

III. Junius On The Noetic Effect Of The Fall And Hamartic Natural Theology

The natural principle of theology must be considered “either in relation to itself, as it was created by God, or according to the sin that besets it and the corruption that followed the fall of our first parents.”[37] We turn now to the latter.

In the first chapter of the Treatise Junius puts the noetic effects of the fall in terms of “blindness and weakness” and the loss of “keenness of mind,” with the effect that “we do not see, except in a false fashion, that very truth of God which we do see.”[38] The noetic effect of the fall appears in this passage to be a kind of confusion or delusion, so that the sinner both sees and does not see. Despite the unqualified theological darkness into which sin has led the human creature, there remains some kind of apprehension of God. Junius affirms, despite this radical noetic shift, some consistency in the character of the natural principle, even in terms of its structure. So he argues from Rom 1, Acts 14, and Acts 17 that the principles of hamartic natural theology are, like the pre-fall, common, veiled, and imperfect.[39]

Under this state of hamartic cognitive breakdown, theology falls subject to homonym or equivocation: “The truth of the matter has produced this equivocation which we have here established, when compared with our own vitiated and erroneous judgment and perception.”[40] And “according to human opinion, something which we have arrived at by our debased and bewildered judgment is also named theology by equivocation.”[41] We may call it “theology,” and Junius more than once defends the convenience of doing so, but strictly speaking this is misleading. The production of counterfeit theology presupposes, in other words, knowledge of the original; forgery does not invent value but lays spurious claim to actual value. Such equivocation is culpable because the original is known. Internal general revelation renders the theology of the state of sin not creative but criminal. For Junius, as noted above, the natural principle as much as the supernatural is in fact God himself, and the bestowal of it gracious, so that “certainly if we should ignore this grace, although it is natural, we will be ungrateful to God.”[42]

“This we name false theology, subject to opinion,” Junius concludes.[43] The theological industry of the sinner is false because it is wholly “removed … from the truth of the subject that belongs properly to theology.” Junius calls it “subject to opinion” because “it rests on opinion alone (if indeed such is properly ‘resting’) in our mind and imagination, fashioning unalloyed dreams and games in place of the truth, and idols and tragelaphs in place of the true God.”[44] The theology of the unregenerate is prolific idolatry.

Later in the Treatise, Junius puts the noetic effects of the fall in terms of the introduction of internal discord. The original, natural principle of theology turns against that supernatural received principle which would have constituted its fulfillment. In short, “the natural gifts,” the innate content and the capacity for fulfillment by a principle of grace, “have been corrupted,” “for how could it have remained uncorrupted in a subject that was corrupted in every part?” And “the supernatural ones,” those gifts of eschatological advance, are “lost.”[45]

That natural principle which survives the fall is corrupted in such a way that it is of itself hostile to the supernatural principle. The hamartic natural principle lacks passive, receptive, or obediential potency, and is so distinguished from the supernatural principle that though they appear to share the same subject matter, overlap produces only equivocation.[46] The “god” of hamartic natural theology is not the God of special revelation. “Consequently, it was necessary,” says Junius, “that inspired theology come to man’s aid.”[47] In the pre-fall situation, supernatural theology would have replaced or fulfilled the uncorrupted natural principle. The hamartic natural principle is a morally disturbed ruin of that original natural grace; true theology must replace the natural principle now not by fulfillment—say, replacement following upon completion—but by an uninvited imposition of redemptive grace, an imposition animated by the purification of the atoning death of the mediator:

Thence that was born which we called inspired theology, supernatural from its origin, a theology of revelation from its gracious way of working; for it shows most powerfully by its origin, its nature, and its mode of communication that in this matter there is nothing that does not come from God and is wrought by divine virtue.[48]

Hamartic natural theology is not exclusively a posture of resistance; it is productive as well. Junius explains that hamartic natural theology is a tree the root of which is a pre-critical sort of theology, “its principles and intuitions and preconceptions” lying uncultivated in the common conscience.[49] The cultivation of implicit and erroneous theological inclinations gives way to philosophical theology—the trunk of the tree.[50] This growth disperses into distinguishable branches of the crown: superstitious, natural, and civil theology.[51] Junius characterizes these as a rich confusion of natural religious idolatry: “It cannot be believed how many and how diverse are the kinds of errors in every time and place which these three types of theology have disseminated, until God graciously revealed His own truth.”[52]

Junius describes the cognitive effects of the fall in plain terms—“entirely corrupted in themselves”—and striking imagery: “Just as the shape of a graceful house is ruined if it is struck by some very heavy blow and falls with great violence … so too, whatever in human nature was graceful has passed away and now lies buried in the jumbled and disorganized mass of our viciousness.”[53] As Junius explains, the theology undertaken in this situation does not, because it cannot, tend toward any kind of perfection or truth-relevant advance. It is nonetheless active and industrious.

IV. Van Til On Natural Theology

Cornelius Van Til compares the image-bearer’s pre- and postlapsarian responses to general revelation. For Van Til, natural theology, as the natural (fallen) man’s handling of the data of general revelation, is not merely the natural theology of Adam plus hamartiological difference. He takes the noetic effect of sin to be neither the diminished reliability of human inferential processes nor a quantitative reduction of the natural theological endowment. Like Junius, he holds that the fall damaged not the endowment or natural grace of the natural principle but the mode of creaturely cognition relative to that provision. Van Til believes that pre- and post-fall natural theologies are distinct modes of reasoning.

In Van Til’s view, pre-fall natural theology was naturally and soundly analogical; and by contrast the natural, fallen man’s theological reflection upon nature is, as expressive of his fallen state, univocal and autonomous. Human reason associated with iustitia originalis, including pre-fall natural theology, is analogical; peccatum originale, constituting a new natural state for the image-bearer (including, as the Reformed have held, both culpa and corruptio haereditaria), entails a shift to univocism as the mode of creaturely cognition. These two modes of reasoning thus differ most basically in their views of just what nature is, in terms both objective and subjective. Accordingly, Van Til’s view of the noetic-regenerative significance of redemptive special revelation—Scripture in particular—may be described as corrective restoration of creaturely-analogical cognition of nature and the self. God “presents himself in Scripture as the One in terms of whom man himself is to forsake his autonomy and permit himself to be interpreted by God. In other words the Scripture presents God as ultimate.”[54] For Van Til, therefore, natural theology post-fall, as theological reflection without the aid of special revelation, must be understood as unregenerate in principle, or in method or epistemic structure, and it is therefore in neither principle nor character—neither actually nor possibly—true theology.

V. Van Til On Pre-Fall Natural Theology

The essence of Van Til’s definition of analogical reasoning is this: the human creature understands the data of experience, including his own nature and thought processes, as derivative and secondary, and as patterned after and revelatory of the self-existent creator God. Analogical reasoning as such treats all cognitive data as the product of the uncompelled and sovereign creative will of the self-contained, tri-personal God.[55]

Evidently, Van Til’s analogical is more or less Junius’s ectypal. Van Til says, for example, “Christian-theism says that there are two levels of thought, the absolute and the derivative.”[56] Herman Bavinck, an important influence on Van Til’s views of method and prolegomena, says that “theology must be called ectypal or analogical,” by which he means:

Our knowledge of God is always only analogical in character, that is, shaped by analogy to what can be discerned of God in his creatures, having as its object not God himself in his knowable essence, but God in his revelation, his relation to us, in the things that pertain to his nature, in his habitual disposition to his creatures.[57]

Van Til argues that reflection upon creaturely response to general revelation must first note that “man did originally think analogically about nature and,” in this way, he “was able to know God truly, as far as God had revealed himself to man.”[58] “When he thought thus about nature,” that is, analogically, “he thought about God as he is … as the self-sufficient and self-consistent rational being.”[59] The knowledge of God as self-existent creator is implicit in knowledge of creation. Analogical reason considers creation as such, as created and as revelatory, as deriving from, in continual dependence upon, and as deferential to its self-sufficient origin. There is no “nature” in an abstract, impersonal sense; only contingent creation as such. Van Til means that all knowledge is revelatory of God; so, as Junius held, theological principles of the intellect and inference, and a natural striving toward God, are the stuff of the pre-fall state.

Pre-fall analogical reason simply takes, a priori, the data of experience and thought as secondary, contingent, derivative, and continuously dependent upon God the self-existent creator. Reality and creaturely reason are essentially theological, or theocentric. It is of the “very bedrock of Christian-theism,” that “man exists by virtue of God’s existence,” and that “man’s environment precedes man.” Therefore, “God is man’s ultimate environment, and this environment is completely interpretative of man who is to know himself.”[60] One may philosophize about God and observe a multitude of indications in nature, in thought, and in one’s self of his hand working wonders, but one does not infer from brute facts that God exists or that it is reasonable to believe that he might. As Junius held, the natural principle of the knowledge of God implies or presupposes the existence of God, the author and object of that knowledge.[61] Adam in the state of original righteousness self-consciously beheld the express thoughts of God as such. He instinctively thought God’s thoughts after him, and therefore could do so consciously as well. There is no self-consciousness apart from God-consciousness. Thus for Van Til, human consciousness is creature consciousness is covenant consciousness.[62]

For Van Til, true knowledge of God was embedded in Adam’s consciousness; tacit, doxological confession of the self-existence and sovereignty of God was expressed in his every epistemic moment—Junius’s gracious natural principle. For Van Til, however, a full endorsement of natural theology in the garden must defer to the divine injunction to coordinate general and special revelation.

Adam’s natural theology was intended to serve as an indispensable servant to special revelation; Adam was commanded by God to recognize the interpretive priority of special revelation over general. God’s image-bearers received express word from God about their creaturely duties in the garden and a conspicuous prohibition against eating from one of the two trees that stood in the midst of the garden.[63] For Van Til, this arrangement indicated that general revelation, though clear and sufficient for its purposes, was not, even in the garden, sufficient theological material for Adam.[64] His true knowledge of God, in the sense of personal communion with his creator, depended upon the creature’s interpreting his context according to the express, special revelatory word of God.

Is there natural theology before the fall? Yes and no. In light of the clarity of general revelation and the analogical structure of Adam’s pre-fall heart and mind, Van Til answers in the affirmative. But this affirmation Van Til quickly qualifies. Pre-fall natural knowledge of God, though sound, is still in another sense incomplete and inadequate. Corresponding to the probationary status of original righteousness, the pre-fall natural principle is good as far as it goes, but its full truth and natural fulfillment is found only in the special speech of God to His image-bearer.

The structure of Adam’s cognition was both analogical and provisional, and therefore, “when man had not sinned, he was naturally anxious constantly to seek contact with the supernatural positive revelation of God.”[65] “The two forms of revelation must therefore be seen as presupposing and supplementing one another. They are aspects of one general philosophy of history.”[66] The partial status of pre-fall natural theology and Adam’s instinctive interest in special revelation indicate the deferral of pre-fall natural revelation to pre-fall special; the objective structure of revelation was reflected subjectively in the way in which Adam knew God and desired to grow in and perfect that knowledge. In this sense, Adam’s original condition naturally anticipated the testing that would come in the form of a prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if not the covenant increase in communion with God which that special arrangement would offer.[67]

Van Til says that general revelation before the fall was for its intended purpose sufficient; but its purpose was that it would be the created context for the creature’s encounter with special. “It was,” he says, “historically sufficient.”

Nature “was but the presupposition of historical action on the part of man as covenant personality with respect to supernaturally conveyed communication. But for that specific purpose,” that is, as the presupposition of a historical covenant relation with God, “it was wholly sufficient.”[68] Natural or general revelation is sufficient, in other words, in its self-evident incompleteness or complementarity. By design it requires supplementation or completion, and its non-verbal self-testimony is to this fact specifically. For Van Til natural revelation is history as such—as historicity and creatureliness. As revelatory, the pre-fall natural man and his Edenic context announce objectively to the human creature that through the growth and development and inferential processes innate to his own constitution he must seek the glory of God in all things. General revelation is not merely revelatory but revelatory and teleological. Van Til prefers the term “covenantal.”

According to Van Til, natural theology before the fall, corresponding to pre-fall natural revelation, is incomplete, though not culpably so. But “good as far as it goes” is for Van Til not a definition of anything, neither of natural revelation nor of natural theology. It merely names the quality—non-culpably partial—of theological information imparted in the one and affirmed in the other. For general revelation this is always true; of natural theology it is true only in the prelapsarian order. Then what is general revelation for Van Til? In a word: covenant context and consciousness. Accordingly, pre-fall natural theology in its ideal instantiations would take the shape of self-conscious interest in knowing and honoring God according to express divine command, a righteous disposition of protological expectation and obediential eagerness. In its pre-fall form, natural theology is good as far as it goes, but taken no further it is no good at all. In Van Til’s view, natural theology undertaken without reference to or independent from special revelation is not a feature of Adam’s life in the garden.

VI. Van Til On Hamartic Natural Theology

Van Til’s notion of pre-fall analogy reflects Edenic anthropology. “Man was created as an analogue of God; his thinking, his willing and his doing is therefore properly conceived as at every point analogical to the thinking, willing and doing of God.”[69] Accordingly, Van Til views the shift in the image-bearer’s cognitive mode and in the manner of his handling the data of general revelation as a function of the sin-propelled shift to post-fall anthropology. If the fall constitutes not a metaphysical but a directional or ethical change from other-rule to self-rule, then creaturely epistemic life may be described as a change from analogous, image-apprehension to univocal, self-interpretive autonomy.

The natural man wants to be something that he cannot be. He wants to be “as God” … the ideal of comprehensive knowledge.… The non-regenerate man takes for granted that the meaning of the space-time world is immanent in itself, and that man is the ultimate interpreter of this world, instead of its humble reinterpreter.[70]

The human creature “normally,” originally, “thinks in analogical fashion.” “He knows that his own interpretation of nature must therefore be a re-interpretation of what is already fully interpreted by God.”[71] And yet:

When man fell he denied the naturally revelatory character of every fact including that of his own consciousness.… He assumed himself to be non-created. He assumed that the work of interpretation, as by the force of his natural powers he was engaged in it, was an original instead of a derivative procedure. He would not think God’s thoughts after him; he would instead think only his own original thoughts.[72]

Fallen Adam is non posse non peccare, and he bequeaths to his posterity both the culpa and corruptio of his own paradigmatic transgression. Because the sinner is guilty, he wills not to acknowledge himself to be a creature of God, since this would be to acknowledge his guilt before an omniscient and holy judge. A creature has no recourse before his creator, and in this case the creature knows himself to be a transgressor of the will of his God. Disincentive to truth is the very stuff of the state of covenant violation:

The very being of any created “fact” whether man, “nature,” or “history,” is exhausted in its revelatory character. There can be no other facts than such as speak clearly of God, therefore of God’s claims upon man. Every fact speaks of God and speaks of him in the imperative as well as in the declarative voice.[73]

The guilty party cannot endorse a description of himself as such because to do so would be an act of repentance, which, if real or genuine (or true in the descriptive sense), implies regeneration. By definition the guilty sinner is one who does not acknowledge the true state of affairs or admit who he is before God, because such admission would be an act of self-renunciation and an initial movement signaling conversion. So to be a sinner is to be a suppressor, specifically of the fact of creaturely derivativeness from the original, and therefore, to be a suppressor is to be a univocist.

In terms of hereditary corruption, we may understand not only that the sinner is unwilling to acknowledge God, but that he cannot, that his non-willing is refusal but also spiritual inability. And so, in order to return from univocal to analogical reason, says Van Til, “in order to negate himself as ultimate and as correlative: the natural man must first negate himself as normal.” “This,” he writes, citing Rom 8:7, “he will not and cannot do.”[74] “His fallen nature has become his second nature.”[75] And if “all things take their meaning from him,” then “it is accordingly no easier for sinners to accept God’s revelation in nature than to accept God’s revelation in Scripture.”[76]

According to Van Til’s view of unregenerate reason as univocal, the fallen creature’s view of evidence and of the data of experience is essentially suppressive. He is predisposed to disallow evidence for the true God, and predisposed to infer a finite god—a god definable is preferred to one self-defined. Adamic rebellion, embedded in unregenerate consciousness, so guides the sinful cognition that not only thought processes but pre-critical reception of data classifies all information univocally, that is, as non-created, as—Van Til’s word of choice—brute. The subject is perpetually re-establishing itself as the sole and ultimate interpreter and categorizer of data.

It does not escape Van Til’s attention that in saying that true interpretation of nature requires true knowledge of God, he must either concede vast theological achievements to the unregenerate or impugn the entire cognitive industry of non-Christians. The unregenerate must, it would seem, either know God or know nothing at all. Van Til bets on the latter: “Unless we maintain that the natural man does not know the flowers truly, we cannot logically maintain that he does not know God truly.”[77] Van Til earns our attention in part because here he takes the path less traveled. But he has first to address the complexity, or perhaps ambiguity, in the notion of unregenerate knowledge of God. In sum, the unregenerate image-bearer knows the existence and character of God but suppresses this knowledge. He both knows and does not know. Or, as Junius suggested, he sees but does not see.

Van Til describes the general revelation of God, impressing itself upon the creature both from around and within him, as “objective to him as an ethically responsible creature” in the sense that “he is bound to react as an ethical person to this objective revelation.”[78] The witness borne by general revelation is not to theological propositions nor to the premises of a theological proof awaiting creaturely inference, but to the personal creator and judge, both his existence and his character, before whom and before whose judicial authority, as it were, the creature as such always finds himself. Thus, for Van Til the objectivity of general revelation is not primarily epistemic or evidential but covenantal, and it is not merely an external-objective witness-bearing but an internal-external creation composite which speaks to and from the fallen creature’s conscience, confronting constantly his wayward self-understanding. In sum:

Having made alliance with Satan, man makes a grand monistic assumption. Not merely in his conclusion but, as well, in his method and starting point he takes for granted his own ultimacy. To the extent that he works according to this monistic assumption, he misinterprets all things, flowers no less than God.[79]

Not only revelation, but God himself is the creature’s environment. The image-bearer in the state of sin knows God if he knows anything at all. “This does not signify,” Van Til explains, “that man would immediately and openly deny that there is a God.”[80] But the posture of sin contends for the self-sufficiency of the finite, so that only a god correlative to creation may be conceived. “Non-Christian thought holds in effect that the distinction between absolute and derivative must be wiped out.”[81] It “holds to the ultimacy of the created universe.”[82] “What he would always deny, by implication at least, would be that God is self-sufficient or self-complete. At best he would allow that God is correlative to man.”[83]

VII. Comparison: Relationality And Pre-Fall Natural Theology

Jesus says that he came not to destroy, dissolve, or abolish the law and the prophets, but rather to fulfill them: οὐκ ἦλθον καταλῦσαι [τὸν νόμον ἢ τοὺς προφήτας] ἀλλὰ πληρῶσαι.[84] Here the notion of fulfilling, fulfillment, or fullness (πληρόω, πλήρωμα) speaks to continuity with the Old Covenant, or to the satisfaction of the internal principle of what preceded. Elsewhere, just a few chapters subsequent, we find discontinuity emphasized: “the prophets and the law prophesied until John” (ἕως Ἰωάννου ἐπροφήτευσαν).[85] “Until” and the aorist convey discontinuation of the action, the prophets and the law prophesying. The fulfillment of this prophesying implies its cessation. So the filling up to which Jesus refers here somehow involves both continuity and supervention. The new assumes the influence of the old while also replacing it. The fulfilling of the old is also its obsolescence.

The author of Hebrews prefers the language of perfection (τελειόω, τελείωσις) and contrasts the imperfection and imperfectability of the Mosaic economy—its priesthood, sacrificial system, the tabernacle, and the regulations for worship, even Moses himself—with Christ, the founder and perfecter (τελειωτής) of salvation, himself made perfect through suffering (διὰ παθημάτων τελειῶσαι).[86] With a grander redemptive-eschatological interest, the apostle Paul articulates a similarly replacement-focused relationship between the natural body (σῶμα ψυχικόν) and the spiritual body (σῶμα πνευματικόν), arguing that the resurrection of Christ from the dead and the constitution of his resurrection body imply the heavenliness and imperishability of the kingdom of God and the inheritance of the saints.[87] Paul’s argumentation in this passage makes use of an agricultural analogy for the death and resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of the dead in general: what is sown perishable, in dishonor and weakness, is raised imperishable unto glory and power.

It is striking that Junius understood the relationship between natural theology to supernatural in much the same terms—a kind of replacement-perfection—even in the garden. Van Til sees only redemption from sin in terms of such supervention, the replacement or re-creation of cursed and corrupted nature by an imposition of grace. As it is, for Van Til pre-fall natural theology is nothing to brag about. For Junius the value of pre-fall natural theology is even less impressive, since he saw it as intended not for completion—Van Til’s view—but for replacement. Van Til sees pre-fall natural theology as awaiting its supernatural complement, but Junius thought the natural should have become obsolete when, by the advancement of creator/creature communion, the supernatural took the place of the natural.

For Van Til, pre-fall natural theology should have tracked with the structure of Edenic general revelation in the latter’s anticipatory service to special revelation. Pre-fall natural theology was incomplete but non-culpably so, and should have led to its own completion through obedience to special revelation. Given the fragmentary character of natural revelation, natural theology was good as far as it went—but so was everything else, and the pre-fall situation, probationary as it is on Van Til’s account, hinged wholly on what it would become. This original good character, therefore, bears little or no value on its own; and so neither does pre-fall natural theology, good as far as it went but not meant to go further. The supernatural, in this case, was the completion of the natural but also its vindication.

On both accounts, pre-fall natural theology is temporary or provisional, and its future depends upon the creature’s response to the word of God. The relational component is front and center. Both Junius and Van Til personalize Edenic natural knowledge, and both see the status of natural knowledge as hanging on the creature’s response to special. The creator/creature covenant relation is constitutive both of the design and of the future of pre-fall natural theology.

One difficulty this comparison faces is apparent ambiguity in Junius’s use of the term “theology.” Junius uses the term to refer both to revelation and to theology; that is, both divine and creaturely activity are denoted by the same term. In fact he means neither divine nor human activity, but “wisdom concerning divine matters,” considered either relative to God or to the creature. Junius appears less interested in identifying the point at which general revelation must evoke either doxology or impudence; in fact, the future of Edenic natural knowledge of God turns not on the creature’s reaction to general—Junius does not objectify Edenic natural knowledge in this way, as Van Til tends to do—but on the creature’s reaction to special. So the original continuity between natural and special Edenic theology—even though it would have entailed replacement—is the epistemic indication Adam should have heeded; as a result of his failure to do so, that organic consonance turned to hostility. Van Til’s attention is focused on the distinction between the revelation given by God and the response of the creature—divine revelation on the one hand and creaturely theology on the other. For Van Til, God reveals; the creature theologizes. Do the two accounts diverge here? On my reading, the difference at this point is largely terminological.

Junius does in fact designate clearly the manner in which revelatory content is present in the creaturely mind. It begins, he says, as intuition. In other words, here Junius distinguishes theology as revealed content or information, crafted by God for creaturely consumption, from the form or condition in which that content rests originally in the creature’s mind. This is the same distinction upon which Van Til rests his account, but he is not in the habit of using the word “theology” to refer to the content of revelation (nor to divine self-knowledge). He tends instead to distinguish theology as an activity of the creature from revelation as an activity of God, and then to emphasize consistency with or faithfulness to (special) revelation as the mark of true theology, no less in the garden than after the fall. Both Van Til and Junius are careful to distinguish objective theological truth from the life of that content once it is placed by the creator in the creature’s care. One must choose one’s ambiguity. Junius faces the ambiguity of the word “theology,” and begs pardon at several points; Van Til’s account suffers confusion in terms of “revelation,” which is both “what God does” and the knowledge that all image-bearers have, even when they are without God.

Van Til believes that general revelation, including the image-bearer’s context and conscience, is designed as the context for special and is necessary as such. Without general revelation, special revelation would be a kind of self- or non-referential, private language—data without categories. As the material of the created world, general revelation serves as a kind of conceptual lexicon from which special draws the terms of divine self-disclosure.

One might detect a common interest at this point. Junius says that ectypal theology is drawn from archetypal, the perfect divine self-knowledge possessed by God and God alone, and crafted according to the capacity of the creature. In other words, ectypal theology is a quantitative reduction from archetypal, because the creature cannot know as much as God does; and it is a qualitative reduction as well, since the creature cannot know as the infinite God does. In Van Til’s terms, general revelation is God’s design of the terms of creaturely knowledge, those terms which serve as pre-requisites to God’s speaking specially and intelligibly to the image-bearer. Junius says that God makes theology according to creaturely capacity; Van Til points out that God designed the capacity as well. The two accounts appear compatible on this count.

VIII. Comparison: Relationality And Hamartic Natural Theology

Adam’s original natural theology meant that by nature he thought God’s thoughts after him. He took for granted the analogous nature of creaturely knowledge and predication. When Eve reviewed the tree that according to the word of the Lord brought death, finding the tree appealing to the eye and promising wisdom, she in effect became a univocist. The word of the Lord became the opinion of an equal, a competing interpretation of the creature and the creature’s context, instead of the self-attesting word of God. This amounts to what Van Til calls “the grand monistic assumption,” effectively renouncing the createdness of the world, of facts, and of the self.

Van Til believes that this is to reject God as God, or to refuse to acknowledge divine privilege, prerogative, and honor due. Van Til does not claim that the fallen sinner always denies the existence of God. Rather, the sinner does not think of God as God nor honor him as such. He may very well affirm the existence of God, but he can only affirm a definable, comprehensible, and thus finite god. For Van Til, the state of sin is epistemic anti-theism. So the fall entailed a shift in the mode or structure of human knowledge, a shift which turned on the character of the creator/creature covenant relation.

Junius’s account is not altogether different. He describes the situation as “chaotic or disorderly.”[88] The fall into sin effected a treasonous conversion of the natural principle resulting in an unqualified inability to acknowledge the innate awareness or objective display of the character and existence of God. But inability does not indicate passivity; the fallen natural principle is subject to industrious and creative suppression. Thus, even theologia falsa is charitable nomenclature. The fall amounts to a transition from a peaceful creaturely disposition to a state of resentment and systemic hostility toward God and the creature as creature. On Junius’s account as well as Van Til’s, the hamartic epistemic state is characterized by an absurd and deluded caricature of the creature and his situation.

Both Junius and Van Til are willing to speak of non-redemptive grace. Junius sees Edenic natural and supernatural theology (revelation) as gracious. The reason for this appears to be that in giving theology, even “at the very moment of creation,” God as it were gives himself; he is, in the garden, the “shared principle of nature equally as of grace.”[89] Here grace is general and unto a universal end, rather than special and particular; the image-bearing race as a whole, in the person of Adam, enjoys this grace of God.

In the Treatise, with reference to the state of sin, Junius does not use the word “grace” in that general (common) sense, but there are indications that he should be open to doing so. The fact that he sees general, non-redemptive grace operative in the garden, plus the fact that continuity of life, even after the terms of Gen 2:17—namely, death for disobedience—become active, would represent even more acutely a general and unmerited good will of God. Against all expectations, “the man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” In other words, it would be unnatural to resist a general and non-redemptive use of the term after Gen 3:6 if one were open to it prior. If perhaps Junius had reserved the language of “grace” for the prospect of pre-fall supervention of the supernatural upon the natural, for Edenic covenant consummation in other words, then the connotation of the same term in the state of sin could be restricted to redemption, but since he refers also to the natural principle which was set for replacement-fulfillment as gracious, this option is not open to him. And Junius affirms continuity in specific terms:

After this nature was corrupted, those first principles yet remained in individuals. They were still shared, veiled, and imperfect. But now they were completely compromised in themselves and quite confused among themselves, as though mere broken fragments of our nature, because of our depravity.”[90]

He says also that hamartic and regenerate theologies, while incomparable, even antithetical, in mode, share the same subject: divine things and things ordered to God.

In Van Til’s understanding the situation is very much the same, though his analysis of a general or common grace is of course more extensive and owes much to Kuyper. On Van Til’s account, postlapsarian generality serves the eschatology of covenant particularism.[91] Common grace is “primarily a restraining power” directed against the development of sin, and so it entails a delay of judgment.[92] Divine restraint and delay open the field of history for the working out of God’s redemptive purposes by, among other things, preserving the knowledge of God in all image-bearers so that all are capable of being addressed by the gospel. Junius affirms natural-theological continuity between the pre-fall and the hamartic states, implying continuous operation of non-saving unmerited favor of God. Van Til affirms the favor of God toward all image-bearers, first in Adam in the garden. He defends a common grace of God as the fabric of postlapsarian history, and claims that a non-saving grace preserves within the fallen man knowledge of God as his creator and judge.[93] Even in the state of sin, the image-bearer’s context is exhaustively theological, exhaustively God-relational: “If we could think of the road between God and man as broken, it would mean also that we should no longer exist and thus the whole question would disappear.”[94] According to both Junius and Van Til, the God-human relationship determines the structure and status of natural theology.

Notes

1. The eighth of thirty-nine theses defended in Junius’s A Treatise on True Theology reads, “Ectypal theology, whether taken in itself, as they say, or relatively in relation to something else, is the wisdom of divine matters, fashioned by God from the archetype of Himself, through the communication of grace for His own glory.” See Franciscus Junius, A Treatise on True Theology: With the Life of Franciscus Junius, trans. David C. Noe, introduction by Willem J. Van Asselt, foreword by Richard A. Muller (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage, 2014), 86, 113, similarly 115, 117.
2. Junius calls it “theology” nonetheless (e.g., theologia falsa) but repeatedly qualifies his decision to do so. See Treatise, 95–96, 143, 145.
3. In particular: Alvin Plantinga, “The Reformed Objection to Natural Theology,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 15 (1980): 49–63; Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Reformed Tradition,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 166.
4. Willem J. Van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Thought,” WTJ 64 (2002): 319–35. Research on early modern Reformed thought on revelation and reason is considerable. Aside from Van Asselt’s article, however, the only sustained engagement with Junius’s Treatise of which I am aware is Todd M. Rester, “Theologia Viatorum: Institutional Continuity and the Reception of a Theological Framework from Franciscus Junius’s De theologia vera to Bernhardinus de Moor’s Commentarius perpetuus” (PhD diss., Calvin Theological Seminary, 2016).
5. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 321–22.
6. Van Asselt, introduction to Treatise, xii.
7. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 321.
8. Van Asselt describes Junius’s Treatise as a “good example of the critical reception of the Christian tradition by Reformed theology” (“Fundamental Meaning,” 322).
9. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 322. Some have argued that Thomas Aquinas is the primary source (see Van Asselt, introduction, xxvi n. 39). Junius acknowledges a “crowd of scholastics” (Treatise, 116).
10. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 323.
11. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 324.
12. It is of course possible for the regenerate to believe and articulate theological error; regeneration does not entail theological genius. Regeneration is necessary for true theology but not sufficient. As Van Til says, the “regenerate consciousness is restored in principle only. It does not and cannot, because of the remnants of sin that remain in man even after regeneration, live up to its own principle fully” (The Defense of the Faith, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 4th ed. [Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2008], 73).
13. Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 325.
14. Junius, Treatise, 95.
15. Theologia falsa is discussed in ch. 1 of the Treatise. Junius discusses natural theology again in ch. 9 and devotes to it the whole of ch. 10.
16. Junius, Treatise, 93. Van Asselt writes, “According to Junius, the existence of theology can be proved formally from the discussion of the etymology of the word ‘theology,’ but also from natural light (naturae lux), the consensus of all people (consensus omnium populorum) and the subject matter of theology itself (res ipsa)” (“Fundamental Meaning,” 324).
17. Junius, Treatise, 94.
18. Junius, Treatise, 93–94.
19. Junius, Treatise, 94.
20. Junius, Treatise, 94.
21. Junius, Treatise, 88, excerpted from theses 23 and 24.
22. Junius, Treatise, 101.
23. Junius, Treatise, 142.
24. Junius, Treatise, 142.
25. Junius, Treatise, 141. Junius writes, “Est igitur duplex Theologiae communicandae modus, natura et gratia; illa, velut internum principium communicationis; haec velut principium externum illius: ex quo fit Theologia una dicator naturalis et supernaturalis altera.” David Noe has supplied the verb “happens,” to read, “the former happens as an internal principle of communication,” and “the latter, [happens] by an external principle of the first one,” so that the duplex mode of communication “happens” as distinguishable principles of communication (Treatise, 87, 141). The verb Noe supplies is uninformative, but it seems from the Latin that there is not much at stake here. In this thesis 14 of the Treatise, therefore, the difference between a mode of communication and a principle of communication is not clear. Shortly after, Junius says, “By this communication we become sharers in this theology. Therefore the principle of that communication is twofold, and from it likewise proceeds a twofold mode of communication. One of these principles is what we call nature; the other, what we name grace” (p. 142). To my mind, this further confuses the matter, since here principle precedes mode, whereas in thesis 14 the duplex mode “happens as” (velut) duplex principle and so appears to precede it. That detail aside, the basic picture is that a twofold mode of communication results in two distinct principles of Edenic ectypal theology.
26. Junius, Treatise, 142. That is, Edenic theological principles are ectypal theology, “fashioned by God from the archetype of Himself, through the communication of grace for His own glory” (Treatise, 86, 113).
27. Junius, Treatise, 153.
28. “For all things in him were then intact and uncorrupted but restricted by the limits of nature, not stepping out beyond nature” (Junius, Treatise, 152–51).
29. Junius, Treatise, 152.
30. “Consequently, those who define theology only by the designation of intellect, or of knowledge, or of skill, harm true theology, since intellect, provided that it is situated in principles, lays the groundwork for reason, and practices the very function of reason, which we call reasoning” (Junius, Treatise, 101).
31. He speaks at one point of “a relative imperfection” (Junius, Treatise, 153).
32. “By the very fact that it is called natural theology, supernatural wisdom is excluded, as it is different in its entire genus” (Junius, Treatise, 152).
33. Junius, Treatise, 153.
34. Junius, Treatise, 153.
35. Junius, Treatise, 154. Junius cites 1 Cor 13:9–10 for the wholesale replacement of the natural by the supernatural, and 1 Pet 1:3, hinting at comparability between the covenantal consummation offered to Adam and that secured for the church by Christ.
36. “Adam would in fact have soared beyond that limit [of nature], but by the kindness of supernatural grace, not, however, by the strength of his own nature” (Junius, Treatise, 152).
37. Junius, Treatise, 151.
38. Junius, Treatise, 94.
39. See Junius, Treatise, 148–50.
40. Junius, Treatise, 95. Van Asselt’s translation reads, “The equivocation we here conclude is effected by the truth of the subject matter compared with the falseness and corruption of our judgment and senses” (Van Asselt, “Fundamental Meaning,” 325).
41. Junius, Treatise, 95.
42. Junius, Treatise, 142.
43. Junius, Treatise, 95.
44. Junius, Treatise, 95.
45. Junius, Treatise, 155; see also 142.
46. This is because “the sharing of the same subject does not produce instances of knowledge that share a genus, but the mode of each does” (Junius, Treatise, 158).
47. Junius, Treatise, 160, from thesis 20.
48. Junius, Treatise, 161.
49. Junius, Treatise, 96.
50. Junius, Treatise, 96.
51. Junius, Treatise, 96–97.
52. Junius, Treatise, 97.
53. Junius, Treatise, 155, 156.
54. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1968), 224.
55. See Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007), 60–70; and Defense of the Faith, 59–73.
56. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 70.
57. Herman Bavinck, God and Creation, vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 110. Elsewhere he says, “The relation of God’s own self-knowledge to our knowledge of God used to be expressed by saying that the former was archetypal of the latter and the latter ectypal of the former. Our knowledge of God is the imprint of the knowledge God has of himself but always on a creaturely level and in a creaturely way. The knowledge of God present in his creatures is only a weak likeness, a finite, limited sketch, of the absolute self-consciousness of God accommodated to the capacities of the human or creaturely consciousness” (Herman Bavinck, Prolegomena, vol. 1 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003], 212).
58. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 177.
59. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 178.
60. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 65.
61. Van Til writes, “Because man’s knowledge of God is logically more fundamental than man’s knowledge of the universe, we may be indifferent to the question of temporal priority. Even if in our psychological experience we know ourselves and the universe about us before we speak self-consciously of God, we have all the while known God if we have truly known anything else” (Defense of the Faith, 65).
62. Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics, ed. William Edgar, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2007), 115–17; Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 62–73, esp. 72.
63. See Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 69–71. Van Til is indebted here to his Princeton professor: see Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1975), 27–33, esp. 32.
64. On the sufficiency of natural revelation, see Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 74–76.
65. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 81.
66. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 66.
67. Vos believes that the natural creator/image-bearer relation implies the ethics of the covenant of works, including requirement of perfect obedience, but could not account for the offer of advancement and immunity from death. See Geerhardus Vos, Anthropology, vol. 2 of Reformed Dogmatics, ed. and trans. Richard B. Gaffin Jr. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2012–2014), 43–44.
68. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 74.
69. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 72.
70. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 63. Van Til says that Eve “denied God’s being as ultimate being. She affirmed therewith in effect that all being is essentially on one level.… At the same time she also gave a definite answer to the question How do we know? She said we know independently of God” (Defense of the Faith, 58).
71. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 77.
72. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 79–80. Van Til cites Ps 94:9, taking it to mean “the absurdity of thinking of God as not hearing lies in the very fact that God has planted the ear of man, that is, that he is the original and that man is the derivative.” Van Til sees the psalm as announcing a charge of culpable ignorance, even insolence, the self-assurance of the wicked and the proud who say, “the Lord does not see; the God of Jacob does not perceive” (Ps 94:7). “The argument is,” he concludes, “that it is unreasonable not to presuppose in God the originals of those things that we see in us” (Introduction to Systematic Theology, 179).
73. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 197.
74. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 179.
75. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 81.
76. Van Til, Christian Apologetics, 79.
77. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 64.
78. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 65.
79. Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology, 65.
80. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 70.
81. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 70.
82. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 71.
83. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 70.
84. Matt 5:17.
85. Matt 11:13.
86. Heb 12:2; 2:10.
87. 1 Cor 15, esp. vv. 42–50.
88. Junius, Treatise, 156.
89. Junius, Treatise, 142.
90. Junius, Treatise, 87, 154 (thesis 18 of the treatise).
91. See Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, ed. K. Scott Oliphint, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2015), chs. 3 and 4.
92. Van Til, Common Grace, 22, 25.
93. Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge, 225.
94. Van Til, Defense of the Faith, 63.