Van Til is often [completely] misunderstood regarding his teaching on brute facts.  For those unfamiliar with Van Til, a brute fact is one that is completely uninterpreted.  It is a piece of “data” that exists “out there” and “on its own” without being interpreted by any mind whatsoever.  Van Til gets the idea and the term from British absolute idealism and he clearly rejects the possibility of such a thing.  But many readers misunderstand the reason for rejecting brute facts.
The postmodernist wants to reject the existence of brute facts by …

At least from the Christian position, tracing the boundaries of philosophy and theology has proven to be quite difficult.  This is due in part to the fact that classic theological loci have so much to say about philosophy’s subject matter.  Cornelius Van Til once remarked that if one’s philosophy was Calvinistic, then it isn’t philosophy anymore – it is theology.  Herein lies the difficulty.  If the philosopher consciously presupposes the Triune God of the Bible in his system and presents Him as the foundation for epistemology, metaphysics and ethics, what …

Modern scientists inherited this false ideal of knowledge from the Greeks. Parmenides saw the vision of reality as one, to which nothing had ever been or could ever be added. Kant followed his modern predecessors; the idealists followed Kant; the “logial atomists” and the “logical positivists” in turn follow the idealists. The “revolution in philosophy” which we have traced so far is a revolution within the Kantian revolution, within the Renaissance revolution, within the Greek revolution, within the revolution of Adam.
Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Evidences . …

In Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis Greg Bahnsen brings up an interesting point regarding the role of special revelation.
Supernatural verbal revelation is, according to Van Til, inherent in the human situation and the intended concomitant to supernatural revelation in nature and in man’s inner constitution.  In that case, man was never – and is not now – expected simply to observe the natural world or consider his own rational, moral personality and figure out for himself how they are to be interpreted and how their truths are to …

Van Til’s editorial Students and Controversies has been posted to the OPC’s website.
A student’s attitude toward a controversy may be said to be normal if it reveals an intelligent and diligent following of all points in dispute. A student wants to learn. He is filled with an insatiable desire for knowledge. To gain knowledge, in the broad sense of the term, is his exclusive aim. For the purpose of acquiring knowledge he goes to the class-room. For that purpose he reads, reads much. With that purpose in mind he …

In 1953, Cecil De Boer, the editor of Calvin Seminary’s Calvin Forum published a series of articles criticizing the “new apologetic” of Cornelius Van Til1. Jesse De Boer2, the sharpest of Van Til’s critics in these issues, wrote a three-part series published from August to November criticizing Van Til’s use of categories borrowed from idealist philosophy. De Boer3 felt it was impossible to borrow these categories without compromising Reformed orthodoxy. The collective response in the Calvin Forum, led by Jesse De Boer’s articles, has become infamous in Van Tilian circles. The character and tone, coupled with superficial critiques, have placed the August-September 1953 Calvin Forum as the forefather of a series of mischaracterizations Van Til’s apologetic system.

Those of you who appreciate the apologetics of Cornelius Van Til will love the works of C. Gregg Singer. Dr. Singer was the apologetics professor at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary from 1985 to his death in 1999. Dr. Singer’s magnum opus is entitled, From Rationalism to Irrationality. If you do not have this book, I would encourage you to buy a copy immediately. They are actually fairly hard to come by, and often very expensive. Dr. Singer also wrote A Theological Interpretation of History, and …

The panel of Christ the Center recently hung out with Lane Tipton and talked with him about Cornelius Van Til’s Trinitarian theology. You can listen here. Lane did an outstanding job of explaining the relationship between the Trinity and theology as it was found in the writings of Dr. Van Til. This was, of course, also the subject of Dr. Tipton’s doctoral dissertation and certain articles.

Who was the lovely critic of Van Til who penned these fine words?
I suggest that Van Til’s apologetics, because it does not grow out of painstaking and complete mastery of great Christian texts, ancient, medieval, and modern, is twisted and victimized by the categories and techniques of the idealists whose works he read in his student days.

We recently interviewed John Muether on Christ the Center. Professor Muether has written a new biography of Cornelius VanTil, focusing on the ecclesiastical commitment of the great Christian apologist. You can listen here.

I recently stumbled upon this interesting quote:

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognised by him.

from The Brothers Karamazov, page 31 of the 2004 Barnes & Noble Classics edition.

It should not surprise us when Christian theologians actually agree with one another. This is especially so when both are understood to be Reformed. It is an interesting fact that Jonathan Edwards and Cornelius Van Til share a view of knowledge or understanding. Here is Van Til’s distinction between true and false knowledge:
The question of knowledge is an ethical question at the root. It is indeed possible to have theoretically correct knowledge about God without loving him. The devil illustrates this point. Yet what …

           Having just finished reading John Muether’s biography Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist and Churchman, and having written a review of it for Modern Reformation, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the strengths of Muether’s work. Professor Muether has sought to give us a picture of Cornelius Van Til as a man deeply committed to the church of Jesus Christ. It was controversy and doctrinal deviations from the Reformed Confessions that shaped the ministry of Dr. Van Til. He was here, first and …