Warfield, as we have already noted, is very critical of this placement. Warfield understands apologetics to be the discipline that precedes the other theological tasks and which clears and prepares the ground for exegesis, historical theology, systematics, and practical theology.

Warfield calls theology done along the lines of this model a “grand assumption” without an apologetic that precedes the enterprise. In other words, how do we know that what we are saying bears any relationship to the truth? As far as I can tell, Warfield and Kuyper are both right and wrong at this point.

Kuyper is correct to note that apologetics arises from within the study of the Bible and Reformed dogmatics and is not something done apart from the very content of Reformed dogmatics. For which/what God do we seek to defend or vindicate? Warfield’s own understanding of apologetics leaves one in no doubt that when doing apologetics, the deity defended is not, at least explicitly, the God of the Bible. He (in good classical fashion) seeks to argue for a generic deity. Once we make space for this generic deity we can then consider specific candidates. However, Warfield is correct to note that apologetics needs to present the truth claims of the gospel without embarrassment.¹

Van Til’s Critical Appropriation
As I have already noted, Van Til did not reject the insights of Warfield out of hand, nor did he accept Kuyper’s perspective lock, stock, and barrel. If Greg Bahnsen is correct in his observation that a proper understanding of presuppositionalism depends upon appreciating how Van Til drew upon and corrected the views of Warfield and Kuyper, then it will behoove us to look closer at Van Til’s agreements and disagreements with these two Reformed stalwarts.

The brief outline I made earlier in this series noted that Van Til accepted what Bahnsen called the “brilliant conception of central importance” of both Warfield and Kuyper.² Warfield’s major insight was that God’s revelation to all men in nature and history was objective, intelligible, and clear. The problem of sinful men rejecting the evidence for God is not, then, with the evidence, but with the sinful human heart that takes the objective, intelligible, and clear revelation of God and suppresses and twists it. The unregenerate man or woman hates God and his revelation.

Kuyper’s central insight builds off of what we have already noted about the sinful rejection of the clear natural revelation of God. Kuyper rightfully stressed the absolute antithesis between belief and unbelief. In other words, natural revelation is never assessed by a neutral mind. Either the believer or the unbeliever interacts with natural revelation.³

If, as does happen, the sinner gets something right about natural and special revelation or about God’s world, it is because he is not abiding by his sinful principles or worldview. It is not because his principles or worldview are correct - they aren’t. When Kuyper talks about the development of two sciences, it might be better to say that there is one true science (that which conforms to God’s own being and thinking about his creation) in reality or objectively and that the two sciences are a reflection of subjective states.

In other words the existence of two sciences objectively considered would yield two worlds not unlike the scenario that J. Warwick Montgomery paints in his “Once Upon an A Priori” in the Van Til festschrift Jerusalem and Athens.⁴ And the principles or worldview of the unbeliever do not reflect reality or come into contact with it on their own assessment of things.

However, the unbeliever never holds his unregenerate views consistently. The two sciences are subjective states,⁵ one which conforms more frequently with reality as constituted by God and one which never could conform on its principles to God’s world but often does because the unbeliever is made in the image of God, exists in God’s world that always reveals him at every point and because the unbeliever lives within the context of common grace.

So Van Til accepted the two central insights of both the objectivity, intelligibility, and clarity of God’s revelation to all men in nature and history and that there is an antithesis between belief and unbelief in which the assessment of the evidence for God in history and nature differs between the two of them. There is but one true science (that which conforms to God’s being and knowledge on an analogical level) objectively considered (i.e., as an extra-mental reality), but there are two sciences subjectively considered (the believer seeks, albeit imperfectly, to conform his scientific thinking to God’s Word and world and the unbeliever seeks to deny God’s Word and world, but cannot do it successfully).

Van Til, however, rejected Warfield’s notion of the evidence leading only to probability⁶ and his confidence in “right reason” as understood as a neutral capacity to properly assess God’s natural and special revelation.⁷ With Warfield, Van Til affirmed the necessity of apologetics, although his understanding of apologetics differed significantly from that proposed by Warfield.

Warfield’s classical method shaped apologetics in the mold of natural theology, apparently unconstrained by Scripture. Warfield’s approach was for apologetics to precede theology and so clear the field for the unfolding of the theological encyclopedia. Also, it would appear as if Warfield and Van Til are in agreement that Christianity cannot be defended on a piecemeal basis.

However, while denying a detail by detail defense of the faith,⁸ Warfield apparently found his two-stage classical method (what Van Til called the “block house” method - a method which defends a generic theism on philosophical grounds and then follows that up with an inductive examination of the historical evidences for Christianity) consistent with his previous denial.

Van Til, I believe, would challenge the abstract nature of both stages of this apologetic. With Kuyper, Van Til would affirm that apologetics is an integral part of the theological enterprise and that it cannot be carried on in abstraction from the theology it seeks to vindicate.

Apologetics does not go before theology in the sense of being done in a non-committal fashion (i.e., in the sense of allowing for abstract possibility). Apologetics must seek to defend Christianity and not some generic or vague natural theology that could have just as easily been formulated by an ancient Greek philosopher.⁹

However, this stress on the biblical basis and systematic theological consistency of apologetics shows that Van Til moves away from Kuyper in Kuyper’s diminution of the apologetic task.¹⁰

End Notes

1. Warfield, “Apologetics,” Works, 9:3, 10, 17.

2. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, 597.

3. The unbeliever also attempts to judge the special principle according to his skewed view of natural revelation.

4. See E. R.Geehan, ed. Jerusalem and Athens: Critical Discussions of the Theology and Apologetics of Cornelius Van Til. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1971), 380-392.

5. By stressing the subjectivity of the two sciences, I do not intend to deny the objective nature of the scholarship produced by unregenerate scientists. In other words, this “science” is objective in an extra-mental sense, but where unbelieving science gets things right it is parasitic of God-conforming science and where it is wrong it conforms to no thing.

6. See below for further discussion of the problems of a neutral method of induction which Warfield seems to embrace which leads to an abstract notion of probability.

7. I have already noted Paul Helseth’s work. I can say this, if Van Til is correct in his understanding of “right reason” in Warfield, he then is correct to reject it. If, however, he is wrong, then Warfield is “close to the kingdom.” However, even if Warfield does not hold to a neutral use of right reason (that is, if right reason is regenerate reason as Helseth would have us think), why then does he follow the classical or “block house” method of apologetics?

8. See Warfield, “Apologetics,” Works, 9: 9.

9. See Warfield’s remarks in his “Apologetics” where he suggests that apologetics is not about defending Christianity as such, at least not initially. He demonstrates his view by noting the apologetics done by Greek philosophers in pre-Christian times, Works, 9: 16-21.

10. I think it could be shown that Kuyper’s stress on worldview thinking and the antithesis was, at least in some sense, an apologetic of sorts. Kuyper’s involvement with the anti-revolutionary party in the Netherlands could surely been seen as a practical form of apologetics as well.