Cornelius Van Til > Quotes

“The Bible is authoritative on everything of which it speaks.
Moreover, it speaks of everything.”
― Cornelius Van Til

“Anti-theism presupposes Theism”
― Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith

“If one does not make human knowledge wholly dependent upon the original self-knowledge and consequent revelation of God to man, then man will have to seek knowledge within himself as the final reference point. Then he will have to seek an exhaustive understanding of reality. He will have to hold that if he cannot attain to such an exhaustive understanding of reality he has no true knowledge of anything at all. Either man must then know everything or he knows nothing. This is the dilemma that confronts every form of non-Christian epistemology”
― Cornelius Van Til

“I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else”
― Cornelius Van Til

“So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.”
― Cornelius Van Til

“It is not kindness to tell patients that need strong medicine that nothing serious is wrong with them.”
― Cornelius Van Til

“[The intellect of fallen man] may be compared to a buzz-saw that is sharp and shining, ready to cut the boards that come to it. Let us say that a carpenter wishes to cut fifty boards for the purpose of laying the floor of a house. He has marked his boards. He has set his saw. He begins at one end of the mark on the board. But he does not know that his seven-year-old son has tampered with the saw and changed its set. The result is that every board he saws is cut slantwise and thus unusable because too short except at the point where the saw made its first contact with the wood. As long as the set of the saw is not changed, the result will always be the same. So also whenever the teachings of Christianity are presented to the natural man, they will be cut according to the set of sinful human personality.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith

“Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it.”
― Van Til, Cornelius, Loud and Clear

“You realize that if you are to change your belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about yourself.”
― Van Til, Cornelius, Loud and Clear

“If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him.”
― Van Til, Cornelius, Loud and Clear

“For what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that points to God. Facts, to be facts at all–facts, that is, with decent scientific and philosophic standing–must have your stamp instead of that of God upon them as their virtual creator.”
― Van Til, Cornelius, Loud and Clear

“if it does not appear reasonable to you, it is reasonable for you, to believe in God.”
― Van Til, Cornelius, Loud and Clear

“It should not be forgotten in this connection that the minister's duty is increasingly that of an apologist for Christianity. The general level of education is much higher than it has ever been. Many young people hear of evolution in the high schools and in the college where their fathers never heard of it except as far as a distant something. If the minister would be able to help his young people, he must be a good apologete, and he cannot be a good apologete unless he is a good systematic theologian”
― Cornelius Van Til, Introduction to Systematic Theology: Prolegomena and the Doctrines of Revelation, Scripture, and God

“How shortsighted and how uncultured, then, are the efforts of believers in Christ when they seek for snatches of worldly culture for themselves by placing themselves, as they think, on common ground with those who are not believers in Christ. How dishonoring to their Christ if they allow that any culture endures unless it be because of the power of his resurrection in the world. If you have been taken out of the miry clay, do you jump back into it because of some glistening objects that you see in it? Do you run back into the house now almost burned to the ground in order to save your silverware? It is only those who are believers in Christ that will inherit the earth and all the fulness thereof.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Essays On Christian Education

“With Calvin I find the point of contact for the presentation of the gospel to non-Christians in the fact that they are made in the image of God and as such have the ineradicable sense of deity within them. Their own consciousness is inherently and exclusively revelation of God to themselves. No man can help knowing God for in knowing himself he knows God. His self-consciousness is totally devoid of content unless, as Calvin puts it at the beginning of his Institutes, man knows himself as a creature of God. There are no atheistic men because no man can deny the revelational activity of the true God within him. Man's own interpretative activity whether of the more or less extended type, whether in ratiocination or intuition, is no doubt the most penetrating means by which the Holy Spirit presses the claims of God upon man... His conscience troubles him when he disobeyes; he knows deep down in his heart that he is disobeying his creator. There is no escape from God for any human being. Every human being is by virtue of his being made in the image of God accessible to God. And as such he is accessible to one who without compromise presses upon him the claims of God.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge

“The basic reason why Justin Martyr is unable to set the Christ of Scripture clearly as a challenge over against Greek philosophy lies in the fact that he has, himself, no adequate biblical view of man. The Greeks assumed that man is free, i.e., autonomous. Justin should have challenged this idea in terms of the biblical teaching with respect to man's creation by God. But Justin is afraid to do this. The Greeks will then, he fears, charge him with holding to determinism or fate. So he virtually admits that he, as well as the Greeks, starts with the idea of man's freedom as the ability to act or not act, to act rightly or wrongly, without regard to the plan of God. Virtually committing himself to the same sort of freedom as that to which the principle of discontinuity as that to which the Greeks are committed, i.e., pure contingency.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge

“The criticism that is valid against Kant is valid against later idealism as well. All idealism is at a loss to interpret the phenomenon of error or evil. As was already noted earlier it will not do to limit the question of error to individual instances and ask how I may be sure that any particular thing will be true. If I am able to doubt one particular thing I thereby doubt the whole, when the whole is so related as Kant and Hegel would have us believe. We then find ourselves in an irremediable dilemma and in desperation proclaim; 'the rational is real and the real is rational,' and help ourselves out of the difficulty by saying that, metaphysically speaking, evil does not exist. Granted, but who will deny that epistemologically speaking error is very real? On what basis then can you explain or explain away that fact? Are not metaphysics and epistemology identical for you? The only alternative seems to be the pessimism of Schopenhauer or Von Hartmann.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Reformed Epistemology

“But if it be said to such opponents of Christianity that, unless there were an absolute God their own questions and doubts would have no meaning at all, there is no argument in return.”
― Cornelius Van Til, A survey of Christian epistemology

“If there are no brute facts, if brute facts are mute facts, it must be maintained that all facts are revelational of the true God. If facts may not be separated from faith, neither may faith be separated from facts. Every created fact must therefore be held to express, to some degree, the attitude of God to man.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel

“We may, therefore, perhaps conceive of the vindication of Christian theism as a whole to modern warfare. There is bayonet fighting, there is rifle shooting, there are machine guns, but there are also heavy cannon and atom bombs. All the men engaged in these different kinds of fighting are mutually dependent upon one another. The rifle men could do very little if they did not fight under the protection of the heavy guns behind them. The heavy guns depend for the progress they make upon the smaller guns. So too with Christian theism. . . Yet in defending the theistic foundation of Christianity we, in the nature of the case, deal almost exclusively with philosophical argument. In apologetics we shoot the big guns under the protection of which the definite advances in the historical field must be made. In short, there is an historical and there is a philosophical aspect to the defense of Christian theism. Evidences deals largely with the historical while apologetics deals largely with the philosophical aspect. Each has its own work to do but they should constantly be in touch with one another. If we are to defend Christian theism as a unit it must be shown that its parts are really related to one another.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Christian Apologetics

“But the best and only possible proof for the existence of such a God is that his existence is required for the uniformity of nature and for the coherence of all things in the world. We cannot prove the existence of beams underneath a floor if by proof we mean that they must be ascertainable in the way that we can see the chairs and tables of the room. But the very idea of a floor as the support of tables and chairs requires the idea of beams that are underneath. But there would be no floor if no beams were underneath. Thus there is absolutely certain prod for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. Even non-Christians presuppose its truth while they verbally reject it. They need to presuppose the truth of Christian theism in order to account for their own accomplishments.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith

“Only in Reformed theology does one find an attempt to take the fundamental motif of Scripture, the self-contained ontological trinity, and understand all the teachings of Scripture in terms of that motif. It is because of this unique conception of God that the doctrines of Scripture such as creation, fall, covenant, redemption, etc., take on their particular Reformed structure which speaks first and always of the glory of God.”
― Cornelius Van Til, The Reformed Pastor & Modern Thought

“Rene Descartes tried to explain how he himself was the final source of predication when he said 'Cogito ergo sum.' But soon enough found that he could say nothing about himself except in terms of God and the world which he had first excluded. Mindful of the failure of Descartes, Kant sought for his self-identity by asserting his freedom from all dependence upon the space-time world or of the laws of morality as revealed by God. But then he found that his freedom was merely a negative freedom. As a result he could not find himself. His noumenal realm is free but free is an unintelligible vacuum.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Is God dead?

“It is readily seen that in the formulation of this Logos theology, the Apologists were largely influenced by Greek modes of thought. The question for them was how they could protect the deposit of faith against those who were real heretics while they were themselves so largely controlled in their thinking by false modes of thought. Here were the Gnostics; they thought of God as the featureless beyond. They brought this featureless beyond into contact with the world of space and time by means of a series of impersonal emanations...The apologists, on the other hand, according to the deposit of faith, thought of the creation or emanation of the Logos as a voluntary act on the part of God. But how would they be able to defend either their doctrine of God or their doctrine of the voluntary procession of the Logos from the personal God against the equivalent teachings of the Gnostics so long as they themselves admitted that God needed an intermediary to make contact with man? If they really held to the God of the Bible there was no room for such an intermediary and if they really held to the personality of God and to the exhaustively personal character of his work with respect either to himself or to the universe, then they would have to renounce their rationalistic efforts...The problem of harmonizing the teaching of the Rule of Faith with the speculations of Greek philosophy would therefore, in the nature of the case, tend to become the problem of defending the deposit of faith against the encroachments of this speculation.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theory of Knowledge

“Now the question is not whether the non-Christian can weigh, measure, or do a thousand other things. No one denies that he can. But the question is whether on his principle the non-Christian can account for his own or any knowledge. I argued that when two people, the one a Christian and the other not a Christian, talk things out with one another, they will appear to differ at every point.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith

“It may be profitable at this juncture to introduce the notion of a concrete universal. In seeking for an answer to the One-and Many question, philosophers have admittingly experienced great difficulty. The many must be brought into contact with one another. But how do we know that they can be brought into contact with one another? How do we know that the many do not simply exist as unrelated particulars? The answer given is that in such a case we should know nothing of them; they would be abstracted from the body of knowledge that we have; they would be abstract particulars. On the other hand, how is it possible that we should obtain a unity that does not destroy the particulars? We seem to get our unity by generalizing, by abstracting from the particulars in order to include them into larger unities. If we keep up this process of generalization till we exclude all particulars, granted they can all be excluded, have we then not stripped these particulars of their particularity? Have we then obtained anything but an abstract universal? As Christians we hold that there is no answer to these problems from a non-Christian point of view...It is only in the Christian doctrine of the triune God, as we are bound to believe, that we really have a concrete universal. In God's being there are no particulars not related to the universal and there is nothing universal that is not fully expressed in the particulars.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Defense of the Faith

“This brings up the point of circular reasoning. The charge is constantly made that if matters stand thus with Christianity, it has written its own death warrant as far as intelligent men are concerned. Who wishes to make such a simple blunder in elementary logic, as to say that we believe something to be true because it is in the Bible? Our answer to this is briefly that we prefer to reason in a circle to not reasoning at all. We hold it to be true that circular reasoning is the only reasoning that is possible to finite man. We must go round and round a thing to see more of its dimensions and to know more about it, in general, unless we are larger than that which we are investigating. Unless we are larger than God we cannot reason about Him by any other way, than by a transcendental or circular argument.”
― Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology. In Defense of Biblical Christianity. Vol. 2. ISBN: 0875524958 / 0-87552-495-8

“The whole meaning of any fact is exhausted by its position in and in relation to the plan of God. This implies that every fact is related to every other fact. God's plan is a unit. And it is this unity of the plan of God, founded as it is in the very being of God, that gives the unity that we look for between all the finite facts. If one should maintain that one fact can be fully understood without reference to all other facts, he is as much antitheistic as when he should maintain that one fact can be understood without reference to God.”
― Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology. In Defense of Biblical Christianity. Vol. 2. ISBN: 0875524958 / 0-87552-495-8

“It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in. It is God, the All-Conditioner. It is the God who created all things, Who by His providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in Him, and who in my later life by His grace still makes me want to believe in Him. It is the God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given you His grace that you might believe in Him. You may reply to this: 'Then what's the use of arguing and reasoning with me?' Well, there is a great deal of use in it. You see, if you are really a creature of God, you are always accessible to Him. When Lazarus was in the tomb he was still accessible to Christ who called him back to life. It is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal thought he had clean escaped from the father's influence. In reality the father controlled the 'far country' to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning. True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument. And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used of God to break down the one-horse chaise of human autonomy.”
― Cornelius Van Til, What I Believe and Why I Believe What I Believe

“The ocean of facts has no bottom and no shore. It is this conception of the ultimacy of time and pure factuality on which modern philosophy, particularly since the days of Kant, has laid such great stress. And it is because of the general recognition of the ultimacy of chance that rationalism of the sort that Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz represented, is out of date. It has been customary to speak of post-Kantian philosophy as irrationalistic.”
― Cornelius Van Til, Apologetics